Pi-Consulting

It used to be said that Continental Europeans have sex lives, while the British have hot-water-bottles.

You don’t hear that one much these days. This may be because British teens-and-twenties, the new de facto arbiters of their country’s sexual attitudes, wouldn’t know what a hot-water-bottle was if they tripped over one while passing the condom rack in their local pharmacy.

These kids are, however, exposed to quite a lot of advertising, and accordingly know quite a lot about sex. Unless you count racy magazines and explicit material on the Internet, disembodied sex is not for the most part a ‘product’ that people ‘buy’. Nonetheless, it has become such a ubiquitous accompaniment to the goods and services on offer to young consumers that they are arguably buying the sex along with the products.

In some instances it is a gratuitous add-on, as in the recent UK ads for Renault cars, based on the theme that “Size Matters”. (This is a fine example of the great British tradition of nudge-nudge ‘single entendres’, whose origins reach back to the saucy seaside postcards of the Edwardian era).

More focused strategies position the product as a way of attracting the attention of the opposite sex. The idea is clearly to position the product as an ‘open sesame’ for young consumers on the pull. The principle can also be applied to beer. In another recent UK campaign, the sultry female announcing that she “likes men, she just hates their guts” was extolling the beer-belly-reducing properties of Bud Light. “Get a six-pack, guys”, — in both senses of the phrase – “and get the girl” is the implied message.

So far so straightforward. The point at which this website gets really interested is where commercial communication is drafted into service in order to sell young consumers “to each other”. Mediterranean package holidays aimed at ‘mad-for-it’ young clubbers are a case in point. Flip through the photos in travel brochures for Club 18-30 or 2wentys, and a number of adjectives will come to mind. However, “modest” and “bashful” will probably not be among them.

It quickly becomes apparent that the product on offer is no longer sun, sea, sand and beachside hotels. What youthful consumers are being sold here is access to their gregarious and complaisant fellow holidaymakers.

The idea behind this may be nothing fundamentally new. Furtive beach-hut romance was commonplace at the very first (British) holiday camps, though back then in the1950s their proprietor, Sir Billy Butlin, kept quiet about these romantic interludes in his squeaky-clean advertising. The clever novelty about the new “Snogathon Holidays” approach is the single-minded focus on — well, let’s call it flirtation, and the fact that both parties to the transaction pay the service-provider for access to each other, in congenial (at least to them) surroundings. In effect, the customer has become the product.

If further proof of this is needed, I can do no better than to quote verbatim from the original “mission statement” in the Club 18-30 brochure. Read and weep. “Find a new position. Have fun. Get the mother of all hangovers. Stay out all night. Sleep all day. Get a tan with no white bits. ….Flirt blatantly with everyone. …Leave those British morals at home. Use your nails. Fall madly in love (for an hour). Let a stranger rub aftersun on your sore bits. Lick ice-cream from his/her bellybutton. …Wake up in the wrong hotel….”. Gentle reader, we are not making this stuff up.

The blatant tone of the original Club 18-30 “mission statement” has been moderated in more recent brochures, but 2wentys still peppers its literature with phrases like “Believe us, getting involved does wonders for your pulling chances”. Go to one of their resorts, and you are left in little doubt what you are there for.

What’s behind it all? Shifting behaviour among subgroups of society can often be explained in terms of demographic and socio-cultural change. Sure enough, patterns of family life throws a revealing back-light behind the emerging sexual mores of the young, whether European clubbers or American Spring-Breakers. The money for these holidays has to come from somewhere. In that context, it is interesting that, aside from marrying later, young people are often living at home with parents considerably further into their twenties. This has an obviously beneficial effect on their disposable income, since they get to defer having to pay rent. But is there a deeper reason?

One possible further explanation is that these kids’ baby-boomer parents grew up in the inter-generational battleground of the 1960s and ’70s, and remember the difficulties of pursuing any kind of intimacy in their own early relationships, in the teeth of parental disapproval. Though they are now in middle-age, these moms’ and pops’ attitudes have — at least in Europe — stayed significantly more permissive than the starchiness of their own parents, (particularly in cases where they didn’t personally benefit much from the liberality of the Swinging Sixties, and have a sneaking feeling that they should have done).

Either way, their children are perhaps the first twentyish generation to find that they don’t necessarily have to leave home in order to have a sex life. Much easier to stay home for another year or two, and reap the pecuniary benefits.

It’s certainly good for business down at “Snogathon Holidays”.