Consumers nowadays are looking for luxury brands that are able to fulfil their values. Luxury fashion marketers have spent enormously on advertising and adopted sex appeal extensively as their major selling technique. Little empirical evidence, however, has been presented with regards to the effectiveness of using sex appeal in luxury fashion advertising. Consumer responses to sex appeal in luxury brand advertisements are also poorly understood and under-investigated. The massive use of sex appeal in luxury brand advertising suggests the strong need for empirical research to determine the relationship between sex appeal and perceived luxury values. Based on the luxury value framework and adopting a quasi-experimental design, this study examines the influence of sex appeal in advertising on the relationships between attitude towards the advertisement and luxury value perceptions. Results show that the increase of sex appeal level increases the favourability of the advertisement which results in significant changes in luxury value perceptions. The influence of gender is found to be prominent in this study, which highlights the importance of gender consideration when adopting sex appeal strategy for any luxury brand advertising. Implications for luxury brand marketers and advertisers are discussed.

• Fang Liu(University of Western Australia, Australia)
• Nurfareena Zahari(University of Western Australia, Australia)
• Mingzhou Yu(University of Western Australia, Australia)