Advertising, “any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods and services by an identified sponsor” (Kotler, Armstrong, Saunders, Wong 2002). It is estimated that each day we are exposed to thousands of adverts (www.rab.co.uk), each attempting to sell their ideas, goods or services to us, and to stand out from this huge crowd, different techniques are employed. One such technique involves the use of fear to motivate the consumer to buy into the ideas, goods or services, and this technique is known as a fear appeal. This report will investigate how fear appeals are used and when they are effective. The use of fear does raise ethical and moral questions and these issues will also be explored.

Firstly it is important to understand what fear is. Fear is described as “a relational construct aroused in response to a situation that is judged as dangerous and toward which protective action is taken” (Rogers 1983). This definition allows for variance through personal definitions of danger which rely heavily on what is important to the individual, for example their life, their safety or even their social status. From this definition we can say that fear is an emotion experienced when something an individual deems as important is put at risk. From this we can begin to understand how a fear appeal works.

Fear appeals are defined as “highlighting the negative consequences that can occur unless the consumer changes a behaviour or attitude” (Solomon, Bamossy and Askegaard 1999:176) but immediately we see problems in this definition. Fear is more than negative consequences; these consequences must have a negative effect on something deemed as important by the consumer. This shows that an effective fear appeal must show the importance of the threat in order to create or emphasise the fear, and this is described by Geller (2003) as the “threat component”.

The threat component is designed to 1) motivate the consumer into seeing (or believing) the risk exists, and 2) that it is also important to the consumer. This sets the scene for the consumer – it creates the fear – so that a solution to the fear can be put forward in the form of the advertised product. This solution side to a fear appeal is what Geller (2003) calls the action component, where the consumer is 3) shown the key to the problem and 4) decides that this is the appropriate action to take. These four stages within Geller’s (2003) two components are the stages of the Protection Motivation Theory, PMT (Rogers 1983). Rogers’ PMT shows that firstly a threat must be acknowledged; secondly that the threat is a likely possibility if no action is taken; thirdly that an effective “coping response” exists and forth and finally; that the consumer must believe they personally can use the coping response to remove the risk. This final stage was developed by Bandura (1977) and is known as self-efficacy. Effective application of Rogers’ (1983) PMT to create a fear appeal depends on the use of the fear appeal.

There are several uses of fear appeals, but first we will investigate Safety Messages. Safety messages are those adverts which attempt to encourage the consumer to change their behaviour for the sake of their own, and others’ safety. Their purpose is to teach – the product being promoted is an idea – the consumer and fear appeals here are most effective as the research of P Slovic (1991) shows; “when an audience can visualize the negative consequences happening to them, personal apprehension is activated and people become receptive to learning strategies for avoiding feared consequences.”

The most common form of safety message adverts are those for road safety and cover all range of aspects of the road, here are a few examples (www.tv.cream.org). The message maybe to; wear a seat belt (clunk-click every trip); be aware of motor cyclists (think once, think twice, think BIKE!); keep your distance (only a fool breaks the two second rule); or not drink drive, among many others. Safety messages are possibly the hardest messages to get across to the consumer because here the consumer believes they are safe and that the message is designed for the unsafe lunatics on the road. The “it will never happen to me” approach is most common amongst young people, as Irwin and Millstein (1986) discovered, finding that “perceived vulnerability to health and safety threats increases directly with age”. Because of this difficulty to get the consumer to listen to safety messages, fear appeals are employed with high levels of fear, but convincing this stubborn audience that they need to change their actions is difficult. Here we look again to the research of P. Slovic who finds that “collective statistics don’t scare us nearly as much as an individual case study” and that “a personal story from an individual similar to the audience heightens perceptions of vulnerability and thus makes the threat seem real, relevant, and frightening”. This can be recognised in road safety adverts such as the seatbelt-use promotion using the dramatisation example of a mother driver on the ‘school run’. In this advert the mother is killed as a direct result of her teenage son – seated behind her – failing to wear a seat belt being launched forward and crushing the mother. This advert shows other teenagers, under the “it’ll never happen to me” illusion that it could happen, and uses the fear of having to live with the effective man slaughter of their mother. The final message 'Belt up in the back. For everyone's sake' shows a course of action and because it is given as an almost flippant instruction, it is clear to the consumer how simple it is to do. This advert, clearly meets the four stages of Rogers’ 1983 Protection Motivation Theory, and the campaign, launched in July 1998, increased child rear-belt usage from 80% to 91% and adult usage from 48% to 59% over the year starting April 1998, clearly very efficient (www.thinkroadsafety.gov.uk).

Another common use of fear appeals is in health messages, again used to scare people into changing their ways because all other methods of getting the message across have failed. Such an advert is the new campaign (launched 1/1/04) by the British Heart Foundation (BHF), showing the consumer the effect smoking has on their arteries, and therefore their long term health. The advert shows a group of friends in a pub having a drink and smoking cigarettes, a scenario which many smokers find themselves in and therefore can relate to. But in the advert, after they light up, fatty goo starts oozing from the end of their cigarettes, dripping down their fingers and landing on clothes (www.society.guardian.co.uk). The advert then shows this ‘goo’ being squeezed from the arteries of a 32year old into a Petri dish (see fig 1 and 2 below). The advert is designed to make the consumer – the smoker – become afraid of smoking, as the BHF state; “The message is clear - if you smoke you risk clogging up your arteries…and every single time you pick up a cigarette we want you to remember this fact.” This approach attempts to make smokers look at cigarettes and become almost physically sick. “The graphic image, linking a cigarette and an artery, serves as a reminder of the dangers of smoking every time a smoker picks up the cigarette” (www.bhf.org.uk). This advert has been very successful in trials, with the BHF finding that “some smokers who took part in our research groups have already decided to give up cigarettes”, and is expected to have a big impact over the next year. This advert however, should in theory be an ineffective fear appeal as it does not fit to Rogers’ PMT, as it fails to show the smoker a solution to the problem, except to quit smoking. Quitting any addiction is a very difficult procedure and it is common for such adverts to accept that Geller’s action component is difficult to implement. Because of this these adverts use very heavy threat components, to make the consumer desperate to quit and ‘find out more’, this is one of the hardest steps towards quitting, and so I could be argued that finding out more is the action component for such adverts.

These two types of fear appeals, in safety and health messages, are often deemed ethically and morally ‘right’ because they are promoting ‘socially accepted’ positive messages. Ethicality and morality is often discussed in terms of deontology and teleology, and this social acceptance is the later of the two. Deontology “asks if the needs of the public are being met by the ad format, or if the method is humane and correct” while teleology looks at the direct consequences of the ad and whether it produces “the greatest balance of good over bad”. Teleology also assesses whether “the greatest number of people are being served by selling the product”, in other words, is it “promoting beneficial goods that improve the consumers quality of life” (Benet, Pitts, LaTour 1993). In the case of health and safety messages it is clear that teleology and deontology are met, and so there is little doubt that these fear appeals are both ethically and morally right. We begin to see problems in ethics and morality of fear appeals as fear is used to part consumers with hard earned currency to dispel these fears.

As previously shown by Irwin and Millstein (1986) the older the consumer gets, the greater vulnerability they feel, and as such advertisers often use fear appeals when targeting older consumers. Many ‘Peace of mind products’ exist, but we must ask which comes into existence first; the product or the fear. A ‘peace of mind product’ will use a fear appeal to promote itself, by showing the consumer – often elderly – how they desperately need the product, and encourages the consumer to believe the product has been created to solve their problems. But in fact it is very plausible that the fear demonstrated would not have been considered by the consumer had the advert not been shown. A good example of this is shown in adverts for the personal communications device, Aid-call. Aid-call is a small device worn around the user’s neck which can be pressed in an emergency to contact the Aid-call helpline, who in turn will send appropriate help to the user. The advert dramatises an elderly woman falling down the stairs and being unable to get up, and emphasis is put on the fact that she lives on her own and so there is no one there to help her up.  The advert then focuses on the device around her neck (see fig 3 below) and the simplicity of how to use the device is demonstrated while the voice-over explains how affordable the product is and how it provides peace of mind, allowing such persons to continue to live at home and not feel vulnerable. For those living alone who had not considered the threat, they are now thoroughly worried of having a fall and are likely to want to order an Aid-call as soon as possible. The advert also makes consumers with elderly relatives worry about their safety. It meets Rogers’ PMT stages, but is it ethical to sell it through fear, especially when the advertiser knows that their target audience will feel highly vulnerable after seeing the advert?

The ethicality of fear appeals is crucial in the effectiveness of the advert because an advert deemed unethical or immoral can cause negative reactions towards the product and or brand. Reactions to an advert deemed unethical range from “consumer indifference toward the advertised product to more serious actions such as boycotts or demands for government regulation” (Snipes et al., 1999) and “some researchers suggest that…improperly used fear appeals damage the credibility of advertisers” (Ellis, SD). This shows that not only can unethical or immoral use of fear appeals be damaging to the image of the product and or brand, but also to the whole profession of advertising. Unethical fear appeals are more noticeable in adverts that play on fears of rejection in social environments based on appearance, such as adverts for anti-wrinkle cream which play on fears of becoming un-attractive with age, or simply of becoming old. 2042

In conclusion we can say fear appeals in adverts must be used very carefully because, dependent on the consumers opinion on its ethicality, can have a positive or negative effect on that which is advertised. The ethicality of fear in safety and heath message adverts are generally accepted, as it is the most effective method of transmitting the message, but as advertisers begin to cross over to saleable products the acceptance varies and this can have a negative effect on the profession as a whole. The bottom line for the ethics of this practice is whether the product is created for an existing and extensive fear or whether the advertiser creates a fear in order to sell an existing product.

For a fuller insight, further investigation is needed into fears of social status and vanity and how this is created and used to promote products. It is also important to investigate why and when fears are rejected as this will make fear appeals more effective.

Word count 2,200

N.B. I was informed by Susan Auty that an automatic 10% tolerance level exists, taking maximum word count to 2,200.  See attached email

Bibliography

Bandura, A (1977) “Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change”, Psychological Review 84 191-215

Benet, S, Pitts, RE, LaTour, M (1993) “The Appropriateness of Fear Appeal Use for Health Care Marketing to the Elderly: Is it OK to Scare Granny?", Journal of Business Ethics, 12, 45-55.

Ellis, SD, “fear appeals”, http://ouray.cudenver.edu/~sdellis/FearAppeals.pdf visited 7/1/04

Geller, E Scott (2003) “Scared safe: How to motivate safety involvement”, Occupational Health and Safety 6, 1 (Feb) 6-10

Irwin C.E, Millstein, S. G. (1986) “Biopsychosocial correlates of risk-taking behaviors during adolescence: can the physician intervene?”, Journal of Adolescent Health Care, 7, 82–96

Kotler, Armstrong, Saunders, Wong (2002) Principles of Marketing: third European Edition Prentice Hall, Page: 626

Rogers, R W (1983) “Protection Motivation and Self-efficacy: A Revised Theory of Fear Appeals and Attitude Change”, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 19, 469-79.

Slovic, P, Flynn J. H, Layman, M. (1991), “Perceived Risk, Trust, and the Politics of Nuclear Waste,” Science, 254, 5038, 1603-1607

Snipes, LaTour, Bliss (1999) “A model of the effects of self-efficacy on the perceived ethicality and performance of fear appeals in advertising”, Journal of Business Ethics 19, 3 (April) 273-286

Solomon, Bamossy, Askegaard, (1999) Consumer Behaviour: A European Perspective Prentice Hall, Page: 176

www.bhf.org.uk, visited 7/1/04 http://www.bhf.org.uk/smoking/utilities/press_releases.asp

www.rab.co.uk, visited 6/1/04, http://www.rab.co.uk/publications/html/wearout.htm

www.society.guardian.co.uk, visited 7/1/04 http://www.society.guardian.co.uk/publichealth/story/0,11098,1114349,00.html

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www.tv.cream.org, visited 7/1/04 http://tv.cream.org/thecore/adroad.htm

www.aidcall-alarms.co.uk, visited 5/1/04, http://www.aidcall-alarms.co.uk/how_it_works.htm