Financial Risk Proneness Explains the "Sex Sells” Hypothesis in Relation to Luxury Brands

Owing to their premium prices, luxury brands carry considerable financial risk for consumers. Drawing from evolutionary research, we theorize that exposure to eroticism in luxury advertising enhances consumers’ willingness to take financial risks and, through it, evaluations of the advertised brand. We test these expectations experimentally in two studies (N = 465; N = 105) and for three categories of luxury brands (wristwatches, vodka, and perfumes), using different measures of risk proneness and brand evaluations. Both studies lend broad support to our expectations. We find that increased risk proneness through erotic advertising in the field of luxury goods improves brand evaluations if the goods can be used for conspicuous consumption and in all model-gender/consumer-gender combinations except of the male-model/male-consumer constellation.