Blog Post 1: Vague Zophilia

A Metaphor too Literal for Comfort

In all of advertising there are few products that can’t be effectively displayed and sold. Jewelry, food, cars, video games, music, all of it can be peddled through any number of mediums and still sell the consumer a complete picture of just what it is that they are missing and, subsequently, what they should be buying.

Except, that is, for perfume.

Perfume is an entirely olfactory experience, regardless of how pretty the bottle is or how relevant the celebrity branding, when it comes down to it perfume is a product that cannot truly be showcased in a television commercial or on the side of a city bus.

Yet despite this, we are bombarded with nonsensical beach scenes and wild horses running through fields and celebrities stripping naked at parties as if literally any of those things pertain at all to a little bottle of liquid that smells like cinnamon. The inability to truly showcase perfume has led to a necessary, if bizarre, evolution in advertising. Where perfume is almost always in the midst of surreal, unrelated scenes packed to the brim with tulle and glitter and blatant soft core pornography straight out of the 80’s.

This ad, shown above, chose a more erotic path, but it is just as disconnected from its product as the Cirque du Soleil nonsense Britney Spears is so fond of.

There’s a naked woman which, logically, makes sense if you subscribe to a “Sex Sells” mentality, and her nudity does a good job of capturing attention amidst a sea of identical, more fully clothed, ads. The woman is also beautiful, and clearly we’re supposed to do the leg work here and assume the message is “if you wear these good smelling chemicals, you too could be sexy like her.” That, is a rather straightforward link. In fact it’s downright Pavlovian, hoping to associate the perfume with being sexy and desirable in the minds of the viewers.

The woman is also decked out in, presumably, expensive and fashionable jewelry. In this, the ad is hoping to create another consumer association of wealth, prosperity, and success. The green silk the model is leaning on also taps our ready-made “green means money” heuristic, working in tandem to form a very explicit message, “buy our product, and you’ll be wealthy, fashionable, and successful too.”

Finally there’s the product itself, obscured by the sexy woman and shine to make it both mysterious and very physically coveted. The model wants it, and she seems nice, therefore I too want it. That may seem silly, but social validation is a powerful force of persuasion. Just ask Cialdini.

But, here’s where it gets weird.

There’s also a lion.

For some reason.

And that’s fine, lions are “kings of the jungle,” despite the fact that lions are neither in the jungle nor capable of forming an organized monarchy, but that’s beside the point. The point is the lion is there to symbolize power and strength and intrigue, but none of that changes the fact that in a very literal way there’s a naked woman spooning a giant bottle of perfume and leaning up against a lion.

That’s absolutely ludicrous.

And the ad is hoping that you don’t view it literally, it’s trying desperately to maintain an aura of fashion and artistry but that’s where, I would argue, it fails. This situation doesn’t form a “could be” scenario attainable by wearing a perfume, or a dreamscape somehow inspired by glorified vanilla extract, instead this scene is just too silly. It’s too improbable and impossible and it shatters the fantasy of wealth and excess it’s meant to inspire.

It’s hard to be taken with the idea of a perfume that can make you sexy and powerful and rich when it includes some really uncomfortable zoophilic overtones. And once that illusion of fantasy is ruined, the other elements, the nudity, the giant perfume bottle, the jewelry, all of it seems ridiculous and out of place. Instead of walking away aspiring to be that model, the consumer walks away confused and aroused in a very disconcerting way.