Marketing Shampoo -- Selling sex with soap suds

Shampoo's main function as a product may be to clean hair, but when it comes to advertising, no form of marketing succeeds more potently to sell this cleansing product to women than the marketing of feminine sex appeal. 'Buy the product, and be a sexy woman/girl.' This may not always come across as good clean fun in the eyes of the consumer, but, even if us not strictly dirty advertising, the need to sell sex as part of the image to the typical female consumer of shampoo cannot be underestimated. What else will distinguish what is otherwise a fairly indistinguishable product, other than the promise of sensuality via the right kind of soaping and suds?

While much of Chapter 7 of Reading Culture by Diana George and John Trimbur makes much of how the female body has been used as an image...
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