Book Review written by Shawn Lawrence. Shawn is a volunteer positive sex educator with interests in power exchange, nonmonogamy, and non-judgemental listening.
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Adonelle Touch by Tõnis Hinnosaar offers all walks of marketers a powerful framework for measurably improving their campaigns drawing inspiration from an unlikely place–the philosophy of positive sexuality. As we read, we discover with him how pillars of positive sexuality like consent aren’t just about sex and reflect on how universal such pillars might really be. Along the way, we take away techniques we can apply tomorrow to longstanding marketing challenges. En route, we encounter at least one confusing stumble. But it’s a worthwhile read, especially in light of how customizable our experience of the book is owing to its broad appeal and superb organization.
Hinnosaar designs his Adonelle Touch framework as a timely response to a world noisy with pushy, inauthentic ads. How, he asks, can we market to people the world conditions to tune us out? Inspired by his personal interest in positive sexuality, he answers by identifying what he calls its “pillars”: Inclusivity, Consent, Openness, and Empowerment. The noise of marketing we’re trying to stand out from, he posits, work against these principles. Maybe we get our message across when we work with them instead. Maybe the principles are about much more than sex.
An understanding of typical business helps us understand the power of Adonelle Touch. Ads and customer journeys that come off as pushy are common in part because of the organizational pressures that produce them. Organizations encounter substantial pressure to become and remain relevant, and that pressure often bleeds through to their marketing techniques. At times, organizations enter a downward spiral in which they push harder because they’re losing voice because they pushed too hard. I appreciated how Adonelle Touch addresses such a climate with actionable tools and metrics.
Hinnosaar hits several strong notes on the way to helping us. He takes the common step laying out numerous exercises and diagnostic tools but goes an extra mile to make those tools widely applicable–from new marketing pros through executives and from an hour of solitary reflection through multi-year roadmaps. He distills difficult-to-measure qualities like “Inclusivity” into workable KPIs that organizations can manage. And Adonelle Touch hits the zenith of its power as it cites improvement in familiar marketing metrics that real organizations have realized and attributed to its recommendations. (A time-strapped reader would do well starting in Part 2 “Practical Tools and Exercises”, noting its data-apparent outcomes, and reading “out” from there to discover how to realize them.)
En route, however, we hit at least one stumble. Hinnosaar asserts that in 2002, the World Health Organization “legitimized sex-positivity at an international policy level, giving the movement an authoritative foundation”. “Adonelle Touch”, he asserts, “translates sex-positive values…that align with the expectations of a generation already living them.” That might surprise BDSM-inclined, nonmonogamous , LGBTQ, and other sex-positive people who, despite gains, continue to face societal misunderstanding worldwide. (They might be even more surprised to find out that, to whatever extent we already live in a sex-positive world, we got there because the WHO told our governments it was the right thing to do.) Hinnosaar’s discussion here seems out of touch, which is tragic considering how unnecessary it is. It is enough to say that Adonelle Touch produces the benefits it claims–which lends powerful evidence supporting his elsewhere assertion that the four sex-positive pillars work because they represent something core to our human nature. Hoping it works because some hard to find sex-positive generation is looking to buy from sex-positive companies is a result much weaker than Adonelle otherwise delivers.
Overall, the Adonelle Touch framework is a well thought out solution to common marketing challenges. Readers will be eager to apply its wisdom and realize positive outcomes others have. I’m fascinated to apply the concepts to my own marketing challenges. And I hope Adonelle Touch continues to explain how and why Inclusivity, Consent, Openness, and Empowerment appeal so generally (perhaps even universally) in future books and editions.