MADELAINE DROHAN: VALUE ADDED

Fear sells

Scaring the money right out of our pockets

January 17, 2007

A throwaway line in a newspaper column this week got me thinking about the use of fear in advertising. The item was about how much of our money is invested in home ownership. But the author noted in passing that we are now at the start of RRSP season, when Toronto's Bay Street spends millions trying to persuade us that we will live out our declining years in poverty if we don't buy a certain mutual fund.

As the season is just starting, we haven't seen the full range of ads meant to persuade us to pick one institution over another to handle our retirement savings. And if memory serves me correctly, in the past, many ads have taken the opposite approach with images of impossibly young couples dancing outside palatial retirement homes, using envy rather than fear as the motivator.

Still, the more I thought about it, the more examples came to mind of companies and governments preying on the type of fears that keep you awake in the middle of the night in an attempt to persuade us to either buy their products or, in the case of governments, change our behaviour.

Governments use such tactics

Governments have long experience in this tactic. They would argue they use it for the common good. Think of the health warnings companies are required to print on cigarette packets. Diseased lungs, people with tubes coming out of them lying on hospital beds, cancerous gums – they are all designed to provoke instant dread, followed by (at least this is the hope) a fervent desire to avoid these possibilities by quitting smoking. Campaigns to get us to drive safely or use our seatbelts are illustrated with the gruesome consequences of what will happen to us if we do not.

On a much broader scale, the war on terror comes with its own set of scary images, and the intention of persuading us not to question the government when it spends our money on equipping soldiers and sending them to fight abroad if we want to feel safe in our own beds.

Fear appears to be a potent weapon, which is why all manner of companies use it in their ads. They range from the crudely simplistic, such as an alarm company ad on television that shows a masked burglar breaking into a home and making off with expensive computer equipment, to the more subtle appeals of cosmetic firms to fight signs of aging with wrinkle creams, hair dyes and expensive makeup. Such ads play on the all-too-human fear of being unattractive and thus unloved.

Drug makers wield the ultimate threat

Pharmaceutical companies are in a class by themselves, as they wield the ultimate threat: Buy our product or you will die. Death can come quickly, in which case the emphasis in ads is on the grieving loved ones you leave behind, or it can be a long, lingering, painful death that you would pay just about any amount to avoid.

The thinking behind the ads is pretty straightforward. But do so-called fear appeals work?

I went looking for the research behind the strategy, and what's really scary is how much thought has gone into fine-tuning its effectiveness. Take a look if you don't believe me at publications like the Journal of Advertising Research, which had an article called "Don't be afraid to use fear appeals: An experimental study," or the International Journal of Advertising, which featured "Fear appeals: Segmentation is the way to go." Or the Journal of Marketing article entitled "Fear: The Potential of an Appeal Neglected by Marketing." The last one was published in 1970, and since then, the marketing industry has corrected the oversight.

The research indicates that while the impulse of companies to use fear to sell their products is pretty straightforward, implementing the strategy is anything but.

First, they have to calculate how much fear they want to provoke. Too much and the viewer or reader might be too traumatized to act, and all the ad will do is heighten his or her anxiety. Too little and the scare can be discounted.

Proffered solution needs to be doable

There is always the possibility that it will be discounted anyway, if the viewer or reader decides, "It won't happen to me." Researchers looking at a campaign to persuade young people to use condoms to avoid HIV/AIDS found young people who knew the activity was dangerous but did it anyway had this reaction.

Targeting the right audience is also important. Not every age group or even every individual is scared by the same things. I may be worried about being overweight and thus unloved. Whereas you may be worried about … well, what are you worried about?

So research is necessary to find out which buttons to push with your target audience. Aging baby boomers are much more likely to react to the threat of being forced to eat pet food and live in a hovel after retirement than young, healthy adults just starting their careers. (No ad that I know of uses the pet food scare, at least not yet).

Finally, and perhaps most crucially, the ad has to propose a solution that the target audience believes is doable. Research into some anti-smoking campaigns found that while some viewers and readers were scared enough, they didn't think they were capable of quitting and so didn't. Likewise, if you are a company selling a product, you have to present it as easy to buy and use, and almost guaranteed to achieve the necessary result.

Is there any defence?

Given how good advertisers are at using this technique, it's worth asking whether there is any protection against this onslaught for the ordinary consumer. Common sense helps, but it can waver in the face of appeals to our basic emotions.

In Canada, there is the Advertising Standards Council. It has an advertising code, which, its website says, is "broadly" supported by industry. Clause 11 of that code says advertisements must not exploit superstitions or play upon fears to mislead the consumer. Anyone can make a complaint to the council if they feel an ad contravenes the code, and the council will investigate.

In the past year, there was only one such investigation. It involved a television commercial sponsored by the Clorox Company of Canada that promoted its water filters. The ad, which is too complicated to sum up here, said that tap water and toilet water came from the same source and suggested that viewers buy a water filter. Clorox changed the ad at the advertising council's request.

Given all the examples that readily come to mind of companies using fear appeals to sell their products, it's surprising that there weren't many more complaints. Maybe we're all too scared.