The Intriguing Psychology of Fear Appeal in Advertising

We are all scared. A teeny tiny trigger is all we need.

We all have brought refined oils due to cholesterol threats. We have pushed friends to quit smoking after watching the dreadful commercials in movie theatres. And we have all thought of buying life insurance, thinking of our loved ones post our sundown. Haven’t we? 

A teeny tiny trigger - that’s all we need! We are all scared. Especially given the pandemic, we are even more cautious about our health and lives. 

Our lifestyles, products and advertising - all have come of age. The orb of brand advertising follows the path that if we dig deeper into why people buy brands, buried is the emotion of fear. 

“People don’t buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons.”

- Zig Ziglar, Iconic Salesman and Motivational Speaker

Advertising has changed drastically over the past two decades as audiences have shifted their attention online. If asked to name some of the challenges, marketers might talk about short attention spans, the popularity of ad-blockers, or people’s annoyance with ads that are aggressive or interfere with the enjoyment of their online activities. 

As a result, it is more important than ever for businesses to be attuned to the emotions of their target audiences. One of the biggest threats to your marketing efforts is not knowing how your customers feel about the products you create. Perhaps you intended for an ad to inspire people, but the tone was preachy and ended up annoying them. Or maybe you wanted people to feel empathy and they felt depressed instead. Without a doubt, the use of emotions in advertising is crucial to advertising success.

There are mainly two types of advertising appeals:

1. Rational appeals

2. Emotional appeals

The rational appeal addresses the consumer’s functional needs of the product. Philip Kotler opined that rational appeal is based on logic and product are been sold by highlighting the product attributes, quality, its problem-solving capacity and its performance. Rational appeals are based on the logic and reason to buy a product. In the actual scenario both the appeals i.e., rational and emotional appeals work together. 

“The most startling truth is we don’t even think our way to logical solutions. We feel our way to reason. Emotions are the substrate, the base layer of neural circuitry underpinning even rational deliberation. Emotions don’t hinder decisions. They constitute the foundation on which they’re made!”

- Douglas Van Praet, Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower Marketing

Six Universal Emotions: 

Based on these six categories, brands are using emotions to drive connection and awareness:

1. Happiness makes you feel good and encompasses everything we talked about above (youth, luxury, etc.) plus other positive concepts like romance, adventure, playfulness, and family bonding. It is the most visible and frequent emotion appearing in the majority of ads.

2. Anger has many uses but is often seen in ads designed to make people upset about things like environmental issues, government policies, and political candidates.

3. Disgust can be used to make people feel bad about themselves in order to sell medications, diet plans, and “miracle” remedies.

4. Sadness is used to evoke a sense of compassion or empathy. Ads like these can be effective at drawing awareness to social issues.

5. Fear is frequently deployed to deter people from harmful behaviours, such as smoking, drug abuse, insurance policies, health-related products, etc.

6. Surprise can appear in combination with other emotions and may be either positive or negative.

Understanding the fear appeal:

Fear is a natural instinct, one that helps us to react appropriately to threats to increase our chance of survival. Fear creates urgency and prompts us to take action; to change or more importantly for this story, to buy something that will prevent terrible things from happening.

These tactics to invoke an urge to take action for protection or prevention can also be termed as scare-vertising tactics.

Fear appeal is a strategy for motivating people to take a particular action, endorse a particular policy, or buy a particular product, by arousing fear. It is a persuasive message that attempts to stimulate fear in order to divert behaviour through the threat of impending danger or harm. 

It presents a risk, presents the vulnerability to the risk, and then may, or may not suggest a form of protective action. It is assumed that through a fear appeal the perception of threatening stimuli creates encouragement of fear. The state of fear is believed to be an unpleasant emotional state that involves physiological arousal that motivates cognitive, affective, and behavioural responses directed towards alleviating the threat or reducing fear.

Here are some examples: 

CEAT’s Streets are filled with idiots campaign - Two ladies are street shopping and lose track of one’s daughter, where the kid wanders on the road but a quick ‘break saves her life. Link:

Saffola Oil Commercial: 

Here’s an example of Saffola Oil: Dil ka Haal - This ads taps on his wife’s disappointment, that she should be worried about his tiredness inducing concern about his health. Link:

Advertisements have high arousal of curiosity evoked perceived vulnerability.

Neuromarketing suggests using a fear-based appeal where it is and is not effective can help you ensure that you are choosing the best approach in a given scenario. When combined with strong ad creativity, real data, and compelling image or video copy, fear-based appeals can help you achieve your sales targets. Proposal of fear should be done in an exceptional way to give an optimistic impression about the product to the targets in the shortest possible attention span. 

Share more examples of fear-based advertising (other than insurance brands, heh!) and let me know your thoughts in comments or write to me at writer.shalaka@gmail.com.