Key Takeaways
- Fear responses are biologically wired as they help you survive.
- Companies want to make you feel fearful. They want to convey the idea that peace of mind can only be achieved if you purchase their product or service.
- Don’t be fooled by fear tactics. You can achieve inner peace without spending your hard-earned money.
Companies are using fear to sell products. This doesn’t come as a surprise.
Fear based advertisements form a large percentage of the marketing material we are exposed to. But why is that? How do marketers identify pain points? And what do they do to convince us that someone or something is dangerous?
Table of Contents
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Fear Sells Takes Root in Human Evolution
Unpleasant emotions encourage us to buy. When we can spend money in exchange for peace of mind, we’re often happy to do so.
At its core, however, a fear-based purchase is not simply a matter of peace of mind, but it is deeply rooted in our biology. A long time ago, the world was dangerous place: life-threatening diseases and illnesses, saber-tooth tigers preying in caves, enemy tribes ready to attack. To protect us from dangers and risks, the reptilian parts of the brain learned to communicate danger to the rest of our body, signalling for tense muscles, rapid heart rate, and fast breathing whenever needed.
Today, we don’t get in many situations where the severity of the threats is high, let alone where fear responses are necessary. In fact, many of us don’t even have to leave our comfort zones to stay alive. Life is safer than ever before, yet, our survival instincts remain.
Marketers take advantage of our primitive brain to sell products, products that are often habit-forming. Their marketing tactics aim to activate unpleasant emotions, so much that we’re willing to avoid a potential loss and make a purchase.
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Fear Sells Because We Want to Avoid Losses
Research by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky shows that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains.1 That is, the fear of loss weighs on us more heavily than gains. For example, the frustration we feel over losing $100 is more intense than the feeling of satisfaction we get from gaining the same amount.
This phenomenon, also known as loss aversion, is the underlying principle behind most commercials we see on TV today. Marketers prey on the fact that we, as human beings, like to focus our efforts on avoiding failure.
How “Fear Sells” Helped Listerine
Take the antiseptic mouthwash Listerine, for example. The product was first formulated by Dr. Joseph Lawrence and Jordan Wheat Lamberts in 1879 and was marketed as an antiseptic liquid for application on wounds, or to clean infections in the human mouth.
Even though Listerine had potential, it could not penetrate the market because it was marketed toward doctors and dentists, and more importantly, because its advertisements were missing the crucial ingredient of fear. Listerine saw a breakthrough in the 1920s when Lambert Pharmacal Company, the company behind the product, changed their communication strategy to panic consumers about oral hygiene. Specifically, they honed in on the worry of having bad breath. One video advertisement in the 1950s ran like this,
“Look at this: Jane has a pretty face. Men notice her lovely figure, but men never linger along because Jane has one big minus in her report card: halitosis or bad breath. Why depend on toothpaste, Jane? Use Listerine antiseptic. The most common cause of bad breath is germs in the mouth. You see, no toothpaste is antiseptic. No toothpaste kills germs like Listerine does by millions.” (You can watch the full commercial here)
Once Lambert Pharmacal Company changed their advertisement strategies to fear, sales increased. Today, the product has been used by more than 1 billion people worldwide, a success that can be largely attributed to the use of fear in their marketing efforts.
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How Fear Affects Your Emotions
Most advertisements and commercials don’t sell products, but they sell the fear of you having to live without their products. Fear in and of itself is not enough to convince someone to make a purchase; The potential customer must be convinced that the product or service can rid them of the fear that is being displayed. When we believe that the item can solve our problem, we form an emotional connection, and an impulse purchase will likely happen.
Warranties Are Based on Fear
Upon purchasing a new product, many people fear that it breaks in the near future. To provide a solution for this worry, many companies offer warranties upon checkout. Warranties on physical products prey on the consumers fear that the product might break in the future. Pay some money upfront and you will get it replaced should something happen to it.
Companies know the probability of product failure, and can calculate the cost of the warranty based on testing and research. If the company knows that 1 in 100 units break over a given time period, a break-even point for the warranty can be calculated. This value is then marked up to ensure a large profit margin, but must remain below the price of the purchasing value (If the warranty costs more than the product itself, you can just buy a new product).
The fear of having to live without the product—that is, the worry that the product will break at some point in the future—is the driving force behind people buying into warranties. Though it might seem like a good idea to opt in, written guarantees are calibrated to ensure they remain profitable.
Fear-Based Advertisements Are Everywhere
Part of every purchase is based on some sort of fear. Browse social media, and you find fear-based advertisements on pretty much anything: antibacterial soaps, heart attacks, shark attacks, climate change. It doesn’t matter if you’re buying into mouthwash or warranties; everyone is fearful of something. We want to avoid a loss whenever possible.
A well-placed cue, one that is subtle and disguised, is often enough to activate the fear centers of our brain. For that reason, companies perform market research to understand how to heighten unpleasant emotions. As consumers, it is important that we see blatant fear tactics for what they are: They are tricks companies use to make people spend as much money as possible.