The power of counter-intuitive awakening
Playboy, the world brand most famously associated with female nudity and sexy bunnies for decades, made headlines recently by announcing that its magazine will go no-nude from 2016.
Playboy, the world brand most famously associated with female nudity and sexy bunnies for decades, made headlines recently by announcing that its magazine will go no-nude from 2016. Yes, no more naked women on display, and thus declaring: “I read Playboyfor the articles” will no longer sound pretentious.
For the publication which probably served as the prime source for generations of young men’s visual introduction to – and lustful imagination about – women’s bare bodies to suddenly go no-nude is certainly counter-intuitive to most people. But it is proving to be one most sensible business decision for reinventing an ageing and increasingly irrelevant brand. Who would still pay for pictures of naked women in the contemporary era when all kinds of nudity, however salacious, are just – at most – a few clicks away for free?
Indeed official figures show thatPlayboy’s circulation has dropped from 5.6 million in the 1970s to its current 800,000. Nowadays the company makes most of its money from licensing its brand around the world to sell various product categories, including fashion and jewellery. About 40 per cent of merchandising income is generated in China, where the magazine is not even available.
Over half a century ago, the publication was pioneering the introduction of women in their most natural state to the world at a time when female nudity was taboo. Now that the internet has made the thrill of eyeballing naked women (in Playboy Enterprises CEO Scott Flanders’ word) “passé”, no less counter-intuitively, the magazine is declaring its founding goal accomplished and making nudes old news – despite the difficult question to answer: “if you take nudity out, what’s left?”
Nudity is already a foregone conclusion on Playboy’s website, whose popularity has since soared with web traffic quadrupling – no doubt benefiting from the social media platforms of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter since purging all nude images.
The story here is not really about Playboy’s history, but instead offers a very useful lesson about the power of a paradigm shift, particularly in the opposite direction. This is about disruption and innovation – to stay relevant when the world you have created has passed you by. Although it’s too early to judge its impact on the company’s future, advertising insiders are applauding Playboy’s change, thinking “it’s genius”.
