Even the most irrational optimist can smell the fear in the air.
Turn on the news or read the papers and it’s unavoidable.
Despite the fact that many online businesses, large and small, are thriving, you don’t hear much about them because bad news seems to sell better.
As marketers, we can only go where the current takes us if we want to operate with greatest efficiency and that means ethically capitalizing on the omnipresent fear which stretches from the self-defense market all the way to high finance.
Here’s a 40 year old ad which uses the fear trigger to sell. I’m making a guess that it came out of copy legend, Dan Rosenthal’s agency because the publishing house was a stone’s throw away from his agency in New Rochelle, New York.
A Google search for a term like, “disaster preparation” is ripe with advertisers, so “dated “ads like these can come in very handy.
You can right click on the thumbnail and choose “Save Link/Target As” to download the 168 KB PDF.
The martial arts and self-defense sales letters on this page are some of the finest, contemporary examples of using the fear trigger to sell.
I agree, pushing the fear button is one of the most powerful ways to market, the question is how far to take it and still feel as though you’re being ethical. This very question came up this week, when I was working with a client who felt it was unethical to go too far into negative territory, and actually the compromise was a good one, pushing a button for sure, but not treading too heavily on the underlying fears.