Does Taboo Advertising Help Getting Consumers’ Attention and Enhancing Memory?

Abstract

Taboo execution of an ad involves themes and images representing a taboo (suicide, murder, deviant sex practices, as examples) to promote a product that is essentially irrelevant to the taboo (Manceau and Tissier-Desbordes, 2006). Exploiting taboos in ads has become a very widely used practice (Vezina and Paul, 1997; Pope, Voges, and Brown, 2004). For instance Benetton has represented various societal taboos as a black woman breastfeeding a white baby or a priest kissing a nun to promote their clothes' lines. In the same way, many brands have followed this advertising strategy based on taboos' violation such as Ikea, Diesel, Calvin Klein or Eastpack. This managerial context has given birth to a stream of research interested in assessing how effective taboo ads are. Literature on sex appeals, fear appeals and more recently provocation has given some insights regarding the effectiveness of taboo ads. Research on provocation provides an interesting theoretical framework and preliminary results on the effects of taboo ad on attention and memory. Vézina and Paul (1997) have shown that provocative ads lead to a greater awareness of the ad and memory, results corroborated by De Pelsmacker and Van Den Bergh (1996) Dahl, Frankenberger, and Manchanda (2003) have also established that provocative ads help gaining and retaining attention compared to fear or informative appeals. Nevertheless, as noted by De Pelsmacker and Van Den Bergh (1996) as well as Vézina and Paul (1997), the research on provocation has major limitations as they are dealing with real ads for well-known brands. Surprisingly, after controlling for brand awareness and previous exposure, the effects of provocation on attention and memory have remained untested and the linearity of the relation between taboo arousing manipulation and attention is not clearly established. Moreover, next to nothing is known about the effect of humoristic taboo ads on attention and memory (Manceau and Tissier-Desbordes, 2006). This present research aims to fill those voids.