Fear-based marketing utilizes consumers’ fears in order to influence and motivate consumers to buy certain products and avoid others.
Studies have shown that consumers remember advertisements that depict or elicit fear better than any other types of advertisements.. As a result, this type of marketing tactic is quite effective since it evokes the consumers' fears, which stimulates anxiety and leads consumers to try to reduce anxiety by buying a product and incorporating or discontinuing a certain habit or behavior.
Using such method leads to exaggeration of claims or risks and propagation of misconceptions related to the contents of the advertisement, often with regard to an alternative product on the market.
Using fear to coax the public is not a new concept. It can be explained by the appeal to emotion also known as pathos, it was coined by Aristotle and describes persuading the public by appealing to their feelings rather than presenting the facts. Pathos can be a logical fallacy when combined with deceptive arguments and baseless claims. The reason why it is so effective can be explained by both physiology and cognitive bias. People tend to make decisions relying on emotions rather than logical reasoning. Fear-based marketing uses this fallacy to appeal to consumers and capitalize on human emotions in order to sell.
Studies demonstrate that advertisements evoking emotions perform two times better than advertisements using only rational triggers. Consequently, this makes this marketing tool really effective and attractive to brands.
Although fear-based marketing can be used positively such as in promoting behavior-changes such as stop smoking and drunk-driving, this is not typically the case.
Most advertising that uses this tactic does so in order to demonize certain ingredients and using cherry-picked data and pseudoscience.
This tactic becomes even more problematic when companies use misinformation to invoke fear. Examples include anti-vaccine advertisements often prominent on social media. A concerning percentage of consumers are continuously being misinformed, fed pseudoscience, and promoted anti-science ideas.
Some examples are: Clean Beauty, NON-GMO, natural ingredients, and greenwashing. These terms are problematic because in many instances, they have no standardized definition (nor regulation) and are promoted to make people feel that other products are inferior: “dirty” or filled with “toxic chemicals” that are harmful—when there is no credible evidence to suggest that’s actually true.
Let’s talk about some examples.
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