Good Marketing Essay Example

Fear has been known as powerful motivator, and advertisers know it. A fear appeal in advertising is content expected to scare the anticipated audience by recitation a serious threat to them. The advertising tactic fear appeal is to inspire the future audience to involve or not involve themselves in convinced behavior based upon fear. Advertising using fear appeals are intended to stimulate anxiety in an audience. The main intentions are that the audience will try to reduce this anxiety by continuing, adopting or avoid the specified course of action or thoughts. The paper will expound a fear appeal in advertising and theory behind the fear appeal advertising. According to Stuteville, there is a heavy and continuous reliance on fear appeals in the marketing of personal products.
Additionally, fear appeal advertising is known to be effective in situations such as the feared condition is evaded through use of the sponsor's product, and what feared is frequently damaged to the social image of the self rather than to the physical self. Contrary to positive appeal, fear appeal content contains deliberate efforts to arouse anxiety. Anxiety-arousing in fear appeal adverting creates a positive relationship which has established between the levels of fear utilized in advertising and the level of anxiety produced in the audience. The intention of fear appeal advertising can cause both positive and negative anxiety effects. Positive effects mean that the intended audiences are motivated in some manner which is defined socially as “in their interest” or the interest of society” (Spence & Moinpour, 1972).
The consequences of fear appeals in product performance are causing a long-term effect. This will make the audience avoid unpleasant adverts. Fear appeals with strong content may be ineffective by making the targeted audience decide the threats do not apply to them. Therefore, causing consumers to tune out from the products and assume that the product is not accurate. On the positive side, fear appraisal adverts tend to work better since their objectives are easy to achieve when it meet the three criteria. The first criteria, if the advert is precise scary, it must offer specific ways for overcoming the fear. For instance, anti-smoking adverts may be precise scary and may offer clear and easy way to achieve and overcome the fear, but it turn to be difficult for people to stop smoking (Spence & Moinpour, 1972).
Parallel response model is the key fear appeal theory, and the theory points out the relationship between the emotional response of the fear and states that persuasion is either linear or positive. The theory also states that, fear appeals that are too strong or weak must be abandoned or avoided. The theory reveals that fear appeals fail to re-incorporate fear as a central variable.
However, in order to justify whether fear appeals are effective in the advertising, it is important to identify the possible negative effects concerning the anxiety stimulation in the society. Moreover, there is the relationship between fear aroused by this adverts and the solution offered by this appeal. Therefore, one must examine the two sides of fear appeals in the market to determine justification. However, the existing studies suggests that there is a need for conducting research involving the impact of communication messages regarding the fear appeals to the consumers. This can help the manufacturers and the audience to understand the fear appeal in communication (Spence & Moinpour, 1972).

References

Spence, H. E., & Moinpour, R. (1972). Fear Appeals in Marketing. A Social Perspective. The Journal of Marketing, 39-43.