Love & Passion Quote by Jef I. Richards

The line lands like a neat little pin in the balloon of lazy marketing. Richards takes a phrase everyone in advertising has heard - "sex sells" - and flips it into a conditional that’s both obvious and quietly accusatory. The sting is in the second sentence: not a moral lecture, not a prudish warning, just a reminder that persuasion is supposed to connect to the product, not compensate for it.

The intent is corrective. Richards is puncturing the industry’s favorite shortcut: the belief that sexual imagery is a universal solvent that dissolves consumer resistance. His point is narrower and sharper: sexual appeal isn’t a magic key; it’s a matching key. If the product category is genuinely erotic (pornography, adult services, maybe certain lingerie brands), sex isn’t a gimmick - it’s information and promise. Outside that, it risks becoming misdirection.

The subtext is about cognitive real estate. Sexual content hijacks attention, but attention is not comprehension and definitely not brand linkage. People remember the body, forget the battery brand. In that sense, the quote also reads as a critique of creative insecurity: when you don’t have a compelling proposition, you borrow heat from sexuality and hope viewers won’t notice the mismatch.

Contextually, Richards is writing from the academic side of advertising, where “effective” means measurable: recall, persuasion, purchase intent, long-term brand equity. It’s a professional’s skepticism, aimed at an industry that too often confuses being noticed with being chosen.