You probably don’t think about termites all that often. I know I don’t. However, on the drive home last week I heard a Terminix radio ad stating that I have a 3 times greater chance of my home getting infested with termites in Austin (where I live) than in other cities.
Terminix’s advertisement triggered my imagination and sent me thinking about the worse case scenarios: Imagine your house destroyed from the inside by nasty little termites. You could face thousands of dollars in repair costs. Ouch!
When to Use Fear Marketing
Some products and services lend themselves to fear marketing better than others. You probably wouldn’t get termite pest control if you weren’t afraid of not preventing trouble. You’d skip the life insurance premiums or the flood insurance if you weren’t at least a little afraid of the unimaginable.
Consider your audience and product before firing off your initial salvo of fear marketing. You could use fear marketing to drive people to action in multiple areas of disaster prevention or mitigation:
- untimely death
- health and illness
- accidents (work or automobile)
- relationships
- safety
- home ownership
- extended warranties
There is an opportunity to leverage fear marketing to your advantage anytime a customer risks losing money, time, property, or life.
When Not to Use Fear Marketing
If your products will make people happy, please don’t dwell on the negative! Focus on all the positive things that will result from purchasing your product. Don’t overshadow your uplifting company and product with negative overtones of doom and gloom.
Not all people will respond to marketing by fear. You may want to balance any fear campaign with an opposite approach highlighting the positive outcomes. A balanced strategy will capture a broader, more diverse group of potential customers.
Fear Marketing Guidelines
Nedra Weinreich gives us several points to make our fear marketing effective:
- Make sure the portrayed consequence of not taking action is severe, but not exaggerated.
- Make the audience feel that the problem is relevant to them.
- Provide a specific action that the audience can take to prevent the portrayed consequence from happening.
- Ensure that the audience believes that the proposed solution is effective in preventing the consequence.
- Portray the solution as something that the audience can easily do.
Provide the Happy Ending
You need to paint a picture for your potential customers that compels them to action. You want them to visualize themselves with a happy ending because they purchased your product. Your product becomes a security blanket that helps the customer sleep at night without the fear of a looming disaster.
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Lance Jepsen Author of Internet Marketing
November 3, 2008
“He has not learned the first lesson in life who does not every day surmount a fear.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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 try to work fear into your marketing literature. I drink orange juice and take a multi-vitamin pill every morning not because I like the taste or want to be super healthy but because I fear getting sick if I do not. I take my car in to have the oil changed every 6 months not because I want my car to run well but because I fear my car breaking down if I do not.
The reason 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 peoples minds that what if that happened to me when I was driving? What would my daughter do if we did not have OnStar?
The tragedy that results in market cycles can be used to make money. I wrote a sales letter for a property management company that advertised their single family home services with the headline, “Afraid Of Losing Your Home To Foreclosure?”
Anger is a subset of fear. On 911 Americans, across the country, went out and bought American flags to hang on their houses and cars. Fear lasted about 3 days after the attack, then anger took over.
Anger can be a very powerful motivator. People hire a lawyer to sue because they are angry at someone. People will go to war because of anger.
Always consider both fear and anger and which is stronger. For example:
“Afraid Of The IRS?”
“Angry At The IRS?”
In this case, anger is the slightly stronger emotion and is the one you should use in the context above. Here is another example:
“Afraid Of A Fire?”
“Hate Fires?”
Fear is slightly stronger than hate (anger) in the example above and should be the one you use.
Always consider both fear and anger as one emotional category and test both, in the context of your product or service, to see which is stronger.
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.”
As the great Abraham Maslow wrote, “Practically everything looks less important than safety.”
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.
Joe Rawlinson
November 6, 2008
Lance,
Anger, as you mentioned, is closely tied to fear in people and can be used powerfully in marketing to prospects.
Thanks for your detailed comments.