Watching the recent cricket test match between India and England on TV in India, I was staggered at the level of advertising repetition I experienced. During one hour, I decided to keep track of the commercials aired. The brands and the number of times they advertised during the hour period are below.

As one can see, 17 different brands advertised during the hour. These brands covered a broad range of categories across products (e.g., Blenders Pride, CEAT and Panasonic) and services (e.g., Amazon and McDonald’s), as well as domestic (e.g., Idea, Fogg and Kent) and global (Axe, Google and Suzuki) brands. Of the 17 brands that advertised, 11, or a whopping 65 percent, aired their ads three times or more, with Gionee, the Chinese mobile phone maker showing the exact same “creative” a mind-numbing seven times during the hour!

Contrary to popular opinion, those bikini-clad young models draped over the show-room Ferrari might be doing your sales more harm than good these days.

Marketing executives have long relied on the idealised female image, usually in the form of a celebrity or model embracing a product or draping themselves across it, in the belief that the placement of these images positively influences purchase decisions.

That may have worked when it was men making list of the purchasing decisions, but today women customers are a force to be reckoned with, and they are not amused. New research by INSEAD reveals a fine line between creating a positive, aspirational image – which makes people open their wallets – and a threatening one that turns away a potential purchaser.

In Defensive reactions to slim female images in advertising: The moderating role of exposure, Amitava Chattopadhyay, INSEAD Professor of Marketing and the INSEAD Chaired Professor of Marketing and Innovation, examined the blatant versus the subtle positioning of models in advertising which showed two very different results.