Fear Marketing, the whole genre of marketing is becoming more and more popular, perhaps in response to the news media's focus on the dangers of our society. Evening news is about murders, arson, car accidents and shootings. Primetime specials on 20/20 and the like promise vital scraps of information about products that "could kill us." Even the political climate and messages from the government in the US ring of fear from elevated terror alerts to "credible threats." In our society of fear, it is no surprise that fear marketing is becoming so widespread, and even more disturbingly, that it works so well.
Fear marketers paint the picture of what our life might be like if we don't get their product. They play into already existing fears, or paint new ones that consumers may never have considered. The end result is the consumer perception that the advertised product or service is a necessity to keep their family safe, make their life less dangerous, or avoid a situation they dread. But should we do it? Doesn't this type of marketing just add to the plague of society, fostering fear and making us a weaker people ?. This paper tries to answer the above questions and also understands how fear marketing works.
INTRODUCTION:
In today’s competitive market, customers are more alert and choosy about what they buy. In this situation, attracting customers through emotions is emerging as an oft used tool by marketers. And of all emotions, fear has taken its own place to stimulate people’s mind faster to buy the products and services.
Fear Marketing is a proven set of marketing strategies and tactics used to motivate target audiences to take massive action quickly. Desired outcomes are achieved quickly through persuasive techniques that tap into powerful emotions.
The objective is to focus attention on the painful consequences of inaction contrasted with the hope of a desired future. These marketing techniques are best used when credible threats are combined with uncertainty and doubt.
Some of the most successful uses of FEAR Marketing strategies and tactics were conducted by IBM Corporation and then Microsoft by shrouding the new computer hardware and software technologies in mystery and positioning themselves as the authoritative high-priests, guarding the secrets of these new technologies.
FEAR Marketing is extensively used by a wide array of persuaders, including: advertisers, news media, politicians, and terrorists.
MEANING OF FEAR :
Fear is an emotional response to a perceived threat. It is a basic survival mechanism occurring in response to a specific stimulus, such as pain or the threat of danger.
FEATURES OF FEAR:
1. Fear is one of a small set of basic or innate emotions. This set also includes such emotions as joy, sadness, and anger.
2. Fear should be distinguished from the related emotional state of anxiety, which typically occurs without any external threat. Anxiety is the result of threats which are perceived to be uncontrollable or unavoidable. Fear begets anxiety. Anxiety together with doubt and indecisiveness plays havoc with our physical and mental health.
3. Fear is related to the specific behaviors of escape and avoidance,
4. Fear almost always relates to future events, such as worsening of a situation, or continuation of a situation that is unacceptable.
5. Fear could also be an instant reaction, to something presently happening
6. Fear is the most common negative emotion.
7. It is universal.
8. It drains away our physical and mental energy.
9. Fear is a great stumbling block to progress.
10. The origin, type and intensity of fear varies from person to person. Nevertheless, fear haunts us all.
11. Fear hampers initiative, suppresses skill, strangles ingenuity and in the process curbs our natural instinct of marching towards higher level of consciousness.
FACIAL EXPRESSION OF FEAR:
The facial expression of fear includes the widening of the eyes (out of anticipation for what will happen next); the pupils dilate (to take in more light); the upper lip rises, the brows draw together, and the lips stretch horizontally. The physiological effects of fear can be better understood from the perspective of the sympathetic nervous responses (fight-or-flight), as compared to the parasympathetic response, which is a more relaxed state. Muscles used for physical movement are tightened and primed with oxygen, in preparation for a physical fight-or-flight response. Perspiration occurs due to blood being shunted from body's viscera to the peripheral parts of the body. Blood that is shunted from the viscera to the rest of the body will transfer, along with oxygen and nutrients, heat, prompting perspiration to cool the body. When the stimulus is shocking or abrupt, a common reaction is to cover (or otherwise protect) vulnerable parts of the anatomy, particularly the face and head. When a fear stimulus occurs unexpectedly, the victim of the fear response could possibly jump or give a small start. The person's heart-rate and heartbeat may quicken.
MARKETING:
Marketing is the process by which companies determine what products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales, communications and business development. It is an integrated process through which companies create value for customers and build strong customer relationships in order to capture value from customers in return.
Marketing is used to identify the customer, to keep the customer, and to satisfy the customer. Companies shifted their focus from production to the customer in order to stay profitable.
The term marketing concept holds that achieving organizational goals depends on knowing the needs and wants of target consumers and delivering the desired satisfactions. It proposes that in order to satisfy its organizational objectives, an organization should anticipate the needs and wants of consumers and satisfy these more effectively than competitors. This requires a unique marketing strategy to be employed. Among many prominent marketing strategies, one of them is marketing through fear.
MARKETING THROUGH FEAR:
FEAR APPEAL:
Advertising that attempts to create anxiety in the consumer on the basis of fear so that the consumer is encouraged to resolve this fear by purchasing the product or service. For example, an advertisement may use people's fear of offending or of rejection to influence them to purchase personal products such as mouthwash or deodorant. Another example of fear appeal is an advertisement for fire insurance that pictures a family
Persuasion “is one of the most basic forms of communication,” Persuasion is an important part of communication. It is basically the process of changing people’s minds. Whether it be a politician grasping for that final vote, or a major advertiser striving to increase sales of a certain product, or an environmentalist organization eager to convince people to recycle, it is a common occurrence. One may be persuaded and not even know about it. It isn’t necessarily a conscious action; persuasion can occur subconsciously as well.
In the act of persuasion, attitude change is extremely important One can be persuaded of an argument, but that does not mean that one will practice what he/she has heard. In changing people’s attitudes, or predispositions toward things the politician/advertiser/environmentalist group will be in the process of changing people’s behaviors. And behavioral changes are the most important.
One way of influencing people through persuasive messages is through the use of fear appeals. They are used to threaten or arouse fear in an audience in order to stimulate attitude change An example of a fear appeal in the 90's is the “Brain on Drugs” campaign, where a fried egg represented the damaging effects of drugs on teenagers’ brains.
Examples of Fear in Advertising and its success:
1 – Take this pill or do this certain thing and your spouse will love you for it. Your relationship will deepen, your sex life will become instantly better, and you’ll be happier!
– If you don’t take this pill or do this certain thing, you’re spouse will eventually leave you for another person. You’ll constantly worry if they’re cheating on you from dissatisfaction and you’ll feel like you’re wasting your remaining years with someone who doesn’t even care about your relationship!
The second message is much more powerful.
2 – Lose 10 Kgs in the next month with Pill “X”. No dieting and no hassles. Imagine how you’ll feel, walking down the beach strutting your new body, grinning with glee as you see heads turning your way.
– Lose 10 Kgs in the next month with Pill “X”. Say goodbye to the stares, whispers and comments from other people as you walk past. Your kids won’t worry if you’re going to die from a heart attack, and you’ll never have to wonder whether or not your friends are making fun of you behind your back.
Not only that, but just count how many times they use negative language as opposed to positive language. That’s part of fear based advertising.
Fear can be a powerful way of introducing the negative affects of something in context i.e. Road death campaigns are extremely powerful because they introduce an identifiable human life that is taken away instead of just bombarding people with statistics. Successful campaigns need only spend a couple of seconds creating an identifiable character before a negative affect is inflicted on them.
The company that attempts to instill fear, is the same one that offers to "help you". Businesses with a traditional client base will most likely hold onto fear marketing for as long as they can and it works.
People buy because of fear. People fear death. They fear getting old. They fear going broke. They fear missing out. Fear comes in many forms and is the most powerful motivator causing people to buy. Always companies are working on fear into their marketing literature. People drink orange juice and take a multi-vitamin pill every morning not because they like the taste or want to be super healthy but because they fear getting sick if they do not. They take their car to garage to have the oil changed every 6 months not because they want their car to run well but because they fear their car breaking down if they do not.
Fear is the most powerful motivator to get people to do what you want stems from the basic need for survival. If you can scare people into buying your product out of fear they will die, you will be guaranteed to increase your sales. "Buy this nicotine patch, this nicotine gum, instead of buying smokes, and live longer" is the basic sales pitch. Nicotine patches and nicotine gum as a solution to breaking a smoking addiction in order to live longer is very powerful sales copy.
OnStar used fear to make billions. Their best pulling ad was an actual recorded call of a little girl saying, "We just had an accident and my Mom isn't moving, please help!" This planted the idea in people’s minds that what if that happened to me when I was driving? What would my daughter do if we did not have OnStar?
Perhaps the most famous use of fear in advertising ever was Tony Schwartz's legendary 'Daisy Ad' for the Johnson campaign. Schwartz suffered from agoraphobia, an abnormal fear of open or public places, and so he understood the controlling power of fear very well.The ad was broadcast on Sept. 7, 1964, during NBC’s "Monday Night at the Movies." It showed a little girl in a meadow (in reality a Manhattan park), counting aloud as she plucks the petals from a daisy. Her voice dissolves into a man’s voice counting downward, followed by the image of an atomic blast. President Johnson’s voice is heard on the soundtrack: "These are the stakes. To make a world in which, all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die."
A combination of fear and vanity marketing is often used by plastic surgeons. The idea is to appeal to peoples’ vanity by exposing their fear of aging.
Kevin Trudeau combines self-improvement with fear in his sales copy: "Natural Cures They Don’t Want You To Know About!" The first sentence in his sales copy reads, "The revolutionary book that talks about the reasons you are sick and how the American Medical Association, Federal Trade Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, and the pharmaceutical cartels are suppressing information about natural remedies and natural cures for virtually every disease."
People buy a little to gain something, but they buy a lot when they fear losing something important if they do not. If guns were outlawed by Congress and the public was told that, after next Friday, they could never purchase a gun again, gun stores across the country would sell out in short order. Even people who never considered owning a gun would rush out and buy one because of their fear at missing out on a last chance opportunity. Last chance sales copy is always very powerful.
Happy people don't buy things. People buy things to get happiness and contentment. We would all be living in mud huts eating nuts and berries if we were not driven by discontentment to improve our level of comfort.
With the increase of technology and power of the media come more and more instances in which fear appeals are used. Not only are fear appeals used to sell products, but they are used to promote health, hygiene, and other things.
In using fear appeals, some negative behavior is usually associated with a negative effect, like smoking and lung cancer, or a positive behavior, unpracticed, is associated with a negative effect, like brushing teeth and cavities In the latter, the communicator will try to persuade the audience in avoiding the negative effect by practicing the positive behavior
The use of fear appeals in advertising has increased over the years, but the communicators have yet to harness the exact formula for producing consistent results time and again Also, the ethicality of recent fear appeals needed to be taken into consideration.
The company can increase the purchases of their products from the strong fear appeal. A common use of fear appeals in advertising is reflected in ads promoting safe sex. An early study on the effect of fear appeals to persuade consumers into using condoms to ward off AIDS were by Hill in 1988. He hypothesized that those who have a greater anxiety toward the contraction of AIDS would have a more positive attitude toward condom ads, and that those who had more sexual partners would also have a more positive attitude toward condom In his experiment, Hill attempted to manipulate his subjects’ levels of anxiety as it related to AIDS. He conducted the experiment through the use of a high and low anxiety controls, and through the effect of high, moderate and non-fear appeals on the two controls He found that higher-anxiety subjects and those with more sexual partners had a more positive attitude toward the ads than the lower-anxiety group He also found that the moderate fear appeal worked best with both groups of subjects, rather than the non- fear appeal and the high fear appeal He concluded that advertisers should “provide information in their promotions which directly discusses the general as well as the individual benefits derived from the utilization of controversial products designed to help the public cope with major social problems,” . This does not only apply to the promotion of safe sex, but to the promotion of items to help protect
against urban violence.
A study on the ethical use of fear appeals on Generation Y, attempted to discover whether sexual and fear appeal ads even apply to the newest generation. Generation Y has several unique characteristics as compared to previous generations, and that college students are the most powerful members of the generation This generation has had much more exposure to the media and respond differently to advertisements. They are also the group that advertisers and marketers want to appeal to.
After they had viewed the sexual appeal advertisement, they were asked to answer the following questions: it is right to use sexual appeals in ads when selling sunscreen, and it is right to use pictures of sexy-looking women in ads to sell sunscreen After they had viewed the fear appeal ad, they were asked to answer the following questions: it is wrong to use a picture of skin cancer in sunscreen ads, and it is wrong for a sunscreen ad to claim that the subject could get skin cancer.
The study found that women were opposed to the use of sexual appeals, whether or not they were idealists or relativists, and that men were in favor of the sexual appeals.The study also found that both males and females, relativists and ideologists were tolerant of fear appeals in advertising
Fear appeals are also commonly used in ads promoting health.
Fear appeal messages about breast cancer led to adaptive behavior
Anti-drug and smoking campaigns are probably the most recognizable form of fear appeals. More memorable ads are the “Brain on Drugs” ads that came of out the 90s. There are also public service announcements that were popular in the 80s, and are still popular today. Many PSA’s feature celebrities or other credible people, and are used to discourage young people from developing bad habits early in life.
Many factors were used in the ads to change and enforce anti-smoking attitudes; they were concern for health, concern for health in others and unborn children, addiction, its apparent “dirtiness,” and others Over all, appeals to fear were most effective with adults if they involved long-term health consequences.
Examples of Fear in Advertising and its failure:
Anti-drug programs like DARE do not typically use strong fear appeal messages, but present a variety of information and involve much contemplation on how the information plays out in real life Also, DARE and other programs have been found to work best with younger children .High school students were skeptical of the effect the information would produce. What is to be understood by this example is that though fear appeals are not used, they are successful i.e. it is not necessary to use fear appeal.
The alleged “exaggerated” fear appeals of a woman destroying her kitchen with a frying pan to simulate heroin use was not found to be exaggerated at all in test studies . It is concluded that the ONDCP did not take personality characteristics of the audience into consideration and that extreme fear appeals are not very effective and often backfire.
CONCLUSIONS:
The use of fear appeals in advertising has persisted over the past three decades despite mixed results regarding their efficacy They have been used to attempt to alter behavior in such areas as smoking , safe driving , alcohol and drug abuse , and most recently risky sexual practices linked with transmission of AIDS. Although definitions of "fear appeal" abound, generally the concept denotes advertising messages containing some sort of threat that affect persuasion by arousing anxiety, in hopes of increasing interest in and attention to messages being discussed. Fear-arousing messages that also contain a counterbalancing recommendation for behavior are thought to reduce this anxiety.
There are some cases in which fear appeals are advisable for both the advertiser and the consumer, such as those alerting people to the dangers of drunk driving or depletion of natural resources. In these instances, the public good and the advertiser's interests are congruent. However, ethical questions arise when advertisers employ excessive amounts of fear (e.g., through graphic depictions of consequences), thereby inducing high levels of anxiety, discomfort, and insecurity; particularly in areas of less than grave concern (e.g., facial wrinkles).
Companies sometimes use fear appeals in attempting to motivate customers to action. The underlying logic when using fear appeals is that fear will stimulate audience involvement with a message and thereby promote acceptance of message arguments. The appeals may take the form of social disapproval or physical danger aside from the basic ethical issue of whether fear should be used at all; the fundamental issue for marketing communicators is determining how intense the fear presentation should be. Numerous fear-appeal studies have been performed by psychologists and marketing researchers, but the fact remains that there still is no consensus on the “optimum” level of fear. Some neither extremely strong nor very weak fear appeals are maximally effective. It seems that appeals at a somewhat moderate level of fear are best.
Arousing fear in individuals in order to spark change is a more complicated process than it was once thought to be. People handle fear differently and also handle fear differently in different situations Also, “what causes fear in one person may be ignored by another,”
The use of fear appeals to incite attitude change depends on a number of variables, and it is difficult to predict whether certain ads will work with certain audiences on any given day. Further research and experimentation is needed to determine whether or not fear appeals can be used in all types of advertisements. Studies on fear appeals, however, will need to continue on as a result of new generations being influenced by new media messages. A social scientist’s work is never done.
The world would be a better place if advertising be a force for common good, feeding ideals not praying on anxieties
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AUTHORS :
1.Dr. Harjoth Kaur, M.Com., MBA.,M.Phil.,B.Ed.,MEG.,NET.,Ph.D,
Professor.
Department of Management Studies,
Sree Chaitanya PG College,
Thimmapoor,
Karimnagar – 505 527.
Andhra Pradesh, INDIA
Mail Id: harshinder1@gmail.com, Mobile: 91 9247139101, 994863173
H-No: 2-4-35/2,
SIKHWADI X ROADS,
KARIMNAGAR – 505 001.
2.Mrs. Gurupreet Kaur.,
M.Com.,B.Ed., ( MBA)
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