Taboo Marketing: The Side-Glace That You Can’t Ignore

Authored by Sai Kiran Kadari | Club Executive Member

A “taboo” is a topic or an act that is considered as harmful or offensive to the general populace and must never be discussed, at least in public. Bringing this into marketing, which is spreading awareness, is a bold move indeed.

While it is evident that marketing your product or service using taboo imagery or tones will lead to more people talking about your product, there must be a solid reason as to why marketers choose to go ahead with these topics. Let’s list some topics that are considered as “taboo”: sex, divorce, mensuration, death, and (to a little extent) LGBTQ+.

Starting with the latter, the reason why I mention that it is taboo only to a little extent is that more and more people are accepting LGBTQ+ people as normalcy, as it should be. The most prominent marketing campaign to embrace this topic openly in recent memory has to be McCain’s “We Are Family” where multiple billboards are shown depicting gay and lesbian couples as families, ensuring that the photos and the moments depicted are seen as “normal”. Not only did this garner attention from both sides, but it also boosted the search results of McCain’s website visits as well as spreading a positive message to its customers.

When it comes to dealing with death, no one is usually brave enough to talk about it head on. No one except the company Dead Happy, who deal with life insurance services. The ball- I mean, the sheer nerves of steel having an insurance that has “Dead” in its name! This company’s aim is to ensure that they know what a life insurance is really about, especially towards the younger generation who don’t like talking about topics such as death or don’t take it seriously.

Now onwards to the most prominent topic in any hormone raging teen’s group discussions: sex. Oh no, I spelled it out without censoring it! Many companies try to keep some innuendoes that depict the act of sex, and this goes way back. Let’s mix this up with a taboo item being marketed: cigarettes! This one bold advert of Lucky Strike Cigarettes depicts a woman holding a cigarette with the tagline of “So Round, So Firm, So Fully Packed”. Get your mind out of the gutter! Sometimes these campaigns might be successful, sometimes not. But one thing’s clear, people will have fun regardless of what kind of situation it is.