You can’t escape the swine flu hype these days, with big words like epidemic or pandemic circulating the media discourse. Wash your hands, sneeze or cough into your sleeve, and stay in if you’re feeling any flu symptoms are just a few behaviors promoted as prevention tactics. While they all make sense and are helpful, their primary motivator is fear. Is fear a sustainable marketing strategy?
Fear is a primal emotion, and marketers know it (a quick fear AND marketing Google search yielded 23.8 million results). As bad as it is, the swine flu death toll so far may equal bad couple of days on U.S. and Canadian highways, but fear defies logic and brings out the animal in you. Our world is no more dangerous than the world of any point in the past, on the contrary, it’s just you’re afraid (made to be afraid?) of things that are relevant to you. Insurance, healthcare, or various safety products are prime examples of stuff fear marketing sells. Similar to terrorism, the idea is that the bad thing only has to happen once, so why take that chance? Fear marketing capitalizes on your fear and through your purchase aims to transform it into a sense of safety. Fear sells peace of mind.
So fear works in marketing, and increasingly so. But that doesn’t mean it’s a sustainable strategy, particularly from the social bottom line standpoint. Forget about cry wolf, for now. Fear paralyzes you, your rational thinking, and your decision making. Fear causes insomnia, unsociability, avoidance, or apathy. Fear induces higher blood pressure, heart rate, sweating, or nausea. If fear leads to any one or combination of these negative outcomes, it’s socially unsustainable. It doesn’t mean fear marketing is going away, however; as long as there’s terror, there will be terrorism. And, as with terrorism, if you give in to the lure of fear marketing, fear marketers win.
Should you be afraid of fear marketing? Not if you market hope or love.
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How true! In the work I’m in I see this all the time. It would be easy, in educating people about toxins, to employ scary statistics. The truth is that I don’t have to scare people. The media does that all the time. All I do is offer a solution and hope in a calm, easy way. For people who are looking for hope while already facing a dreaded disease there is already enough fear of loss, fear of death, fear of pain and fear of financial expense. Hope feels pretty good in comparison. People generally go toward what feels good!