Provocative advertising and its impact on young people in Finland – a focus group study of people age 16-25

Abstract

There are countless of different advertisements floating all over the world nowadays and people, who can be viewed and consumers, buyers or watchers have a hard time memorizing or being impressed by any of them since they have already been accustomed to the exaggeration. As a result, advertisers have found ways to slide in factors that can be comprehended as inappropriate and disturbing just to gain more attention from the audiences, hopefully increase their brand image and that is ‘’provocation’’. This points directly to the main purpose of the thesis, which is to dig into the interpretation regarding the term ‘’provocation’’ in advertising by the young generation and from there see how impactful it could be to the brand image in the industries selected. The thesis covers how provocative advertising is interpreted and defined, the risks that come along with it, how well it performs on advertising in different industries and how diverse the youth’s reponses are to it. Despite having a broad spectrum in terms of aspects, this study’s limitation is only to focus on ‘’sexuality’’ side of provocation and the targeted audiences are from 16-25 year-old teenagers who live in Finland. The research is mainly done with qualitative method with focus groups and interviews and the findings gathered do show different understandings of provocative advertising, in which one industry (food) displays it more negatively than the other (fashion). Additionally, it has also been proven that the youth tends to be more exposed and as a result, more accepting towards provocative advertising than older people. Regardless, women do most of the time find provocative ads offensive and degrading given the frequent women portrayals in this type of ads, which leads to a major risk, that is if the sexuality factor is not brought into the advertisement cleverly and with an acceptable level, it might cause the brand to be cut off by customers and all the successful efforts of gaining a massive amount of attention from the beginning will all go to waste.