Why Sex Sells？

Years ago some colleagues of mine built what we thought at the time was the “holy grail” of business marketing:  A sophisticated analytical tool that could tell a marketer where to invest, why, and what the return would be in sales productivity.   It could also tell them where to cut dollars, why and what the impact would be on the business.


It was an incredible feat of analytical modeling and technology.  Built for one of the most respected and well known companies in the world, so the CMO could answer with absolute certainty the CEO’s question: “What am I getting for my marketing spend?” We thought that it was our ticket to the big time and the rocket to ride to explosive growth, but that was not the case.

It turned out to be the only one we sold.   And that always baffled me.  Anyone who saw the tool was awed by its power and insight, but they didn’t buy.

Over the years, I picked up some clues as to why others would not buy:

• The head of a major west coast based IT company warned us that our business intelligence tool and analytic model might limit his managers’ ability to make decisions based on their experience … “gut feel.”
• The CMO of a global software company was concerned that our meticulously designed marketing processes, with stage gates and Gantt charts might limit his team’s creativity.
• The head of marketing finance at a major Financial Service company told me that every year they run their marketing optimization model and it tells them that they overspend on TV, and under spend in print. But at the end of the year if there was additional budget leftover the CMO puts it in TV.

I’ve now been able to put the pieces together.  I came from a marketing science world and have since learned to appreciate and understand the value of the art of marketing.

Data and analytics can tell you where customers are, what they look like, what they’re interested in, but science alone can’t make customers buy.  It can’t make customers advocate for a brand, and it can’t make the hair stand up on the back of their necks.

Insightful, creative and relevant ideas that trigger human emotions can –  and do – sell.   For as much as I wanted to believe that buyers were rational creatures behaving in predictable patterns, I now understand that they are not.

Marketing, as much as we want it to be, is not an exact science.  Technology innovation has allowed us to better understand buyers, influencers and the performance of our activities.

But at the end of the day, business is personal.  We can’t remove the human element from the buyer or seller side.  Relationships and perceptions matter, how a product and/or a brand makes a customer feel is important, and it’s not easy to model or predict.

And with that, I found the answer: Although helpful and informative, good marketers don’t need to rely on sophisticated analytical tools to make decisions. Their experience, “gut,” and sometimes the hairs on their back of their neck do just fine.

Across the great divide：Brokeback Mountain is far more than a gay western.

I first read "Brokeback Mountain", the short story on which Ang Lee's new film is based, when I was wacthing judging a short story award in 1998. It's by Annie Proulx, but I didn't know that then. The names of the writers were stripped from the works for the purposes of the competition. The early pages of this unknown western narrative did not interest me, because I thought at that time, and think still, that the myth of the Old West, with its gunslingers and traditional masculine bravado, was stifling, repellent, and misguided. And yet I remember calling out to my wife, midway through this particular story, saying, "I'm reading this cowboy story that I thought I was going to hate. I thought the only way I was going to like it was if these cowboys had sex! And then they did!"


It is hard, therefore, not to think of Brokeback Mountain as an incredibly salient political statement for troubled times. I'm sure that there are many public relations professionals right now trying to pretend that this is not the case, that this film is not an affront to certain senators from Wyoming and Texas and Utah and Colorado and Montana and Idaho, and perhaps an affront to the president of the United States himself, who comes from the state often burlesqued in Ang Lee's film. The president, I presume, will not be screening it at the White House.


In truth, many things act against the prospect of success for this ambitious project. The script was kicking around for almost seven years and even a director as accomplished as Gus van Sant could not find actors who were willing to undertake it. It was budgeted at a level so thrifty that it's a miracle it looks as stylish and painterly as it does. This was likely to be a famously unproduced movie. And yet here it is.

In the United States, where it opened recently, Brokeback Mountain is being marketed as "a great American love story". However, just as it was impossible to know that the same director's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was subtitled, until the lights dimmed and the projectionists rolled the film, you will find this beautiful, still, melancholy cowboy movie - which concerns a fervent and furtive romance between two men in the rural American west - a bit, uh, surprising if, like many in the US, you harbour the prejudice that a great love story takes place between a man and a woman. Yes, there's no doubt that the studio that released Brokeback Mountain is keen to stay on message. And yet calling Lee's film a "gay cowboy movie", as I've heard it described, would not exactly be a way into the hearts, minds and pocketbooks of, arguably, the most homophobic nation on earth. Of course, whether it is a "gay" movie or a "love story" is one of the interesting questions about Brokeback Mountain


By and large, the narrative of Brokeback Mountain follows the outline of Proulx's justly celebrated short story, which first appeared in the New Yorker magazine in 1997. A young ranch hand in Wyoming, Ennis Del Mar, signs on to do some sheep herding in the Rocky Mountains one summer, in the process meeting another such young man, Jack Twist. The two become fast friends, and there the matter seems to rest until a night when the temperature has plummeted and they elect to share a tent. As in the helter-skelter of Nature, which seems to unfurl limitlessly just beyond their tiny provisional shelter, one thing leads to another, after which the two spend the rest of their allotted time on Brokeback Mountain, the summer range for their flock of sheep, like lovers do.


The rest of the story is told through crosscutting, as the men try to go back to their respective lives as before, unperturbed by this unbidden, unsought, yet life-changing experience in the mountains. Ennis marries the lovely Alma, and almost immediately he begins to make a botch of their union, though he manages to help raise a pair of adorable daughters. Jack, meanwhile, meets and haphazardly courts a somewhat loose rodeo girl from Texas, Lureen. He finds prosperity as a salesman of farm equipment in her father's business. Still, Jack, of the two men, is the more willing to try to pursue his secret life. The results are not only bad, but potentially dangerous, as Ennis warns him, during one of their later semi-annual assignations: "This thing grabs on to us again in the wrong place, we'll be dead."


Proulx's story is largely told in a laconic third-person voice from the perspective of Ennis Del Mar. The accounts of Jack are mainly available to the reader through dialogue between Ennis and Jack. But in Lee's adaptation, a number of Texas-based scenes are invented for Jack and his rodeo-girl wife, Lureen. While the Wyoming scenery of Ennis Del Mar seems sand-blasted, woebegone, and desperate, as if cribbed from the dust bowl photos of Walker Evans, the Texas scenes are hyperbolic. Lureen has four or five different hairstyles in the film, each of them excessive, and on the basis of this film it appears that no man can live in Texas without a bola tie. It's as if Larry McMurtry, unable to match the wry but stoic tone of Proulx's story, has bulked out the screenplay with additional material from his own early work.



Brokeback Mountain is a luminous, startling and sorrowful portrait of a love that truly can't be spoken of by its nearly wordless participants. As such, it is almost as affecting and classically sound as Romeo and Juliet. Therefore, it's not only important to see this film. To wrestle with its successes and mild imperfections is practically a civic duty of thinking persons, lest we should give in, the way Ennis Del Mar nearly does when he says ruefully to his beloved Jack: "If you can't fix it, you gotta stand it."

For you，a thousand times over. No one else can like you like I do. I wish I knew how to quit you. I don't want to say goodbye to you for ever.

Baby won't you tell me why there is sadness in your eyes
I don't wanna say goodbye to you
Love is one big illusion I should try to forget
but there is something left in my head

You're the one who set it up now you're the one to make it stop
I'm the one who's feeling lost right now
Now you want me to forget every little thing you said
but there is something left in my head

Chorus:I won't forget the way you're kissing
The feeling's so strong were lasting for so long
But I'm not the man your heart is missing
That's why you go away I know

You were never satisfied no matter how I tried
Now you wanna say goodbye to me
Love is one big illusion I should try to forget
but there is something left in my head

Chorus:I won't forget the way you're kissing
The feeling's so strong were lasting for so long
But I'm not the man your heart is missing
That's why you go away I know

Sitting here all alone in the middle of nowhere
Don't know which way to go
There ain't so much to say now between us
There ain't so much for you
There ain't so much for me anymore

Chorus:I won't forget the way you're kissing
The feeling's so strong were lasting for so long
But I'm not the man your heart is missing
That's why you go away I know
That's why you go away I know

How can you see into my eyes like open doors？

You’re the one that I want, the one that I need 

The one that I gotta have just to succeed 

When I first saw you, I knew it was real 

I’m sorry about the pain I made you feel 

That wasn’t me; let me show you the way 

I looked for the sun, but it’s raining today 

I remember when I first looked into your eyes 

It was like God was there, heaven in the skies 

I wore a disguise 'cause I didn’t want to get hurt 

But I didn’t know I made everything worse 

You told me we were crazy in love 

But you didn’t care when push came to shove 

If you loved me as much as you said you did 

Then you wouldn’t have hurt me like I ain’t shit 

Now you pushed me away like you never even knew me 

I loved you with my heart, really and truly 

I guess you forgot about the times that we shared 

When I would run my fingers through your hair 

Late nights, just holding you in my arms 

I don’t know how I could do you so wrong 

I really wanna show you I really need to hold you 

I really wanna know you like no one could else know you 

You’re number one, always in my heart 

And now I can’t believe that our love is torn apart 

I need you and 

I miss you and 

I want you and 

I love you ‘cause 

I wanna hold you, 

I wanna kiss you 

You were my everything 

And I really miss you 

I knew you gonna sit and play this with your new woman 

And then sit and laugh as you’re holding his hand 

The thought of that just shatters my heart 

It breaks in my soul and it tears me apart 

At times we was off I was scared to show you 

Now I wanna hold you until I can’t hold you 

Without you, everything seems strange 

Your name is forever planted in my brain 

Damn it, I’m insane, 

Take away the pain 

Take away the hurt 

Baby, we can make it work 

What about when you 

Looked into my eyes 

Told me you loved me 

As you would hugged me 

I guess everything you said was a lie 

I think about it, it brings tears to my eyes 

Now I’m not even a thought in your mind 

I can see clearly, my love is not blind 

I just wish everything could have turned out differently 

I had a special feeling about you 

I thought maybe you did too 

You would understand, but… 

No matter what, you’ll always be in my heart 

You’ll always be my baby 

Our first day, it seemed so magical 

I remember all the time that I had with you 

Remember when you first came to my house? 

You looked like an angel wearing that blouse 

We hit it off, I knew it was real 

But now I can’t take all the pain that I feel 

Reach in your heart, I know I’m still there 

I don’t wanna hear that you no longer care 

Remember the times? Remember when we kissed? 

I didn’t think you would ever do me like this 

I didn’t think you’d wanna see me depressed 

I thought you’d be there for me, this I confess 

You said you were my best friend, was that a lie? 

Now I’m nothing to you, you’re with another guy 

I tried, I tried, I tried, and I’m trying 

Now on the inside it feels like I’m dying 

And I do miss you 

I just thought we were meant to be 

I guess now, we’ll never know 

The only thing I want is for you to be happy 

Whether it be with me, or without me 

I just want you to be happy