Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of sexual appeal in print media on consumers’ brand recall. More specifically, the differences between the fixation time on the “image” and “logo” elements in advertisements, with and without sexual appeal, were verified. Design/methodology/approach The correct research is experimental in nature, and divided into three stages: choosing the print advertisements to be viewed by the participants with eye tracking, capturing participants’ eye movements using a special eye tracking equipment and completing the questionnaire for calculating the number of brands recalled by the participants. Findings The authors have identified that there are no statistically relevant differences between the number of brands recalled, whether the advertisement does or does not have any sexual appeal. Practical implications The use of sexual appeal in advertisements on print media must be made with caution, and several implications for the textile and apparel industry are expressed in the conclusions. Originality/value The study’s relevance is threefold: the authors present more recent results about the relationship between sexual appeal and brand recall, as the most recent research study of a similar type was published in the late 1990s; they adopt key concepts from the neuromarketing field in an attempt to connect memory with the capacity of different components of the advertisements, to attract the visual attention of consumers; and they present results for three different product categories (alcohol, apparel and perfume).

Studies show that the recall of a particular brand is essential for its value generation. In an attempt to attract visual attention and thus influence the process of fixing the brand in the consumer's memory, marketing professionals use, in their ads, content with the presence of sex appeal. Such content suggest, among other forms, the exhibition of nudity (partial or total) of physically attractive models. In this context, this research aims to verify if the presence of sex appeal in advertisements for print media influences brand recall from the perspective of Neuromarketing. The discipline of Neuromarketing can be defined as an area of study that uses clinical analysis tools to better understand physiological reactions of individuals and how such these reactions affect consumer behavior. The tool used in the research was the Eye-Tracking, which consists of a device that captures eye movements and records the points of greatest visual attention. The research was conducted in three stages: initially, were chosen thirty real print media ads and , through a survey with 96 participants, six ads with sex appeal were selected. Then two hundred and one participants watched, for five seconds, six different ads. Of these two hundred participants, 100 of them watched the ads with the presence of sex appeal and the 101 watched ads without the presence of appeal. At this stage, the records of eye movements were captured by the eye-tracking. At the end of the experiment, participants answered a questionnaire that, among other information, mentioned which brands were contained in the ads. The statistical test to prove whether there are differences between the two groups, considering the data collected, was the Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon test. The results showed that the presence of sex appeal in advertising has no influence in the consumer's ability to remember a brand. Under the Neuromarketing vision, the results showed that participants spend more time looking to the sex appeal image comparing with the non sex appeal image. Considering the fixation duration in the brand image, the results presented that there no statistical difference between sex appel and non sex appeal advertising.