Creating Conscious Messages Part 1: Replace Fear with Value
This is the first article in a 4-part series on how to craft conscious marketing messages. Each article explores a specific communication practice to avoid in order to better respect customers, create value, and grow your business. Additional articles in this series include:
Introduction to Conscious Messaging
This article series is about messaging: how to do it in a way that is transparent, realistic, and uplifting vs. exaggerated, manipulative, and negative.
That all sounds intuitive and easy to agree with, but it’s pretty darn hard to put into practice. Case in point: writing the headline for this series. I wrote more than 20 iterations before making my final selection which embodies the ideas I’m espousing.
My goal is to change the status quo in marketing to make the discipline more conscious, but my draft headlines - “How to Avoid Manipulating Your Customer” and “Stop Using Fear to Sell” - were utilizing the very tactics that I’m about to argue we should all avoid.
This series lays out an aspiration for marketing and brand messages. An aspiration we might not reach all the time, but striving for it requires that we are conscious of the messages we create and the impact they will have on our customers and our business.
There is a common culprit behind communication that exaggerates or manipulates: putting business interests ahead of customer interests. We almost always think we are putting customer interests first, but when we closely examine how we use messages to sell our products and services, occasionally we unconsciously mislead and pressure to generate sales.
We all want to avoid these outcomes, both because it doesn’t feel right and because it doesn’t lead to long-term business growth, which is why it’s critical to expose these tactics and root them out of our messaging.
There are 4 common messaging practices that I consider unconsciously manipulative. Each article in the series will explain why we want to avoid these practices and what to do instead.
PART 1: Replace Fear with Value
I recently took my husband indoor skydiving for his birthday. The “flight” itself was thrilling, an experience I can’t wait to repeat. However, every other part of my customer experience was dominated by a single business strategy: upsell.
From the website where I bought my tickets two months in advance to the check-in process to check-out, I was bombarded with these messages: “You’ll wish you bought 4 flights instead of 2,” “Everyone prefers the high-fly,” “Don’t miss out on pre-buying a future flight because your 50% discount expires today.”
Contained within each of these messages are the seeds of fear, which elicit doubt, worry, and comparison: What if I’m not doing everything I can to make this the best experience possible? Only 5 minutes after entering the building, I was exhausted, full of distrust, and disappointed I couldn’t just enjoy the adventure I had already purchased.
These messages are everywhere. Whether by capitalizing on existing fears or creating a sense of fear that didn’t already exist, the dominant perception is that fear sells. Articles abound on topics such as “How to use fear to generate clicks,” and common messages highlight “5 Ways you are ruining….” or “Sign up for our newsletter or you won’t get access to….” The use is so pervasive, and in many cases subtle, that we might not even recognize the tactic as fear.
Using fear to sell is not new. We can see evidence of this strategy in a 1920 Listerine ad campaign pictured below titled “Don’t Fool Yourself,” featuring women who alienate their own children because of bad breath.
While using fear to sell is not a new idea, this practice has become explicit and normalized within the world of marketing, resulting in more brands intentionally using fear-based communication to incentivize sales.
Why Avoiding Fear Marketing Matters
I argue we should avoid creating needs based on fear for two critical reasons: First, using fear, even subtly, can have a negative impact on our customers. Secondly, it may not be as effective as we think.
A conscious marketer’s goal is to create value by offering a product or service that will make customers’ lives better - part of that value includes the message itself. Marketing can build trust, give hope, educate, and inspire, or it can pressure, generate skepticism, create anxiety, and spark negative emotions. Our messages present a great opportunity to put our customers well-being first.
How Fear Marketing Harms Our Customer
Fear-based communication activates a fight or flight reaction because the body senses an emotional threat. Planting seeds of doubt exploits this physiological response (“What if I miss out on X? Will I be successful without Y? Will this bad thing happen if I don’t buy Z?” ) creating or exacerbating feelings of inadequacy, negativity, comparison, and sometimes hopelessness.
Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) can negatively affect mental health, create sleep disturbances, and lead to overall unhappiness by reducing satisfaction with our own lives. Marketing that elicits FOMO, also known as “FOMO Marketing,” introduces new desires that make customers feel less off in their current circumstances in hopes of selling more. Whether or not the customer buys, the message leaves a residue of negative feelings.
Is that our goal?
We may think these strategies are harmless. What can one email headline do? Or one advertisement? But by employing these tactics, we give our consent, even our endorsement, to the practice of making people doubt or feel bad about themselves in hopes of persuading them to buy our products and services.
Fear-Marketing Hides Low Demand
Ethics aside, many marketers advocate this selling tactic because they think it works. While there is some data to show that fear-based strategies increase conversion rates and short-term sales, in the long run, they can contribute to lower retention and lifetime customer value and create brand distrust.
When fear is used in messaging, rarely is the goal to reduce or eliminate a customer's pre-existing concerns. Instead, fear is typically manufactured or exaggerated to induce a feeling of need. Why? Because the value of the product or service is not obvious.
A common message strategy involves helping your customers “avoid failure” in order to create urgency to buy: “If you don’t buy our service, all these bad things could happen!” Frequently, the harm or the risk associated with failure is exaggerated or infrequent and is based on an underlying assumption that there is not enough demand without fear.
If a brand depends on fear-based communication to generate interest, a bigger problem likely exists: the product/market fit may be off, customer needs are not understood, or the benefits don’t resonate. Addressing these fundamentals is a much more effective strategy to deliver long-term growth than using fear for short-term sales.
When we have a product that meets real customer needs, we don’t need to artificially create demand to sell our product or service. Rather, we can craft a value-focused message that explains how the product solves their problem.
Fear Reduces Customer Satisfaction
If customers feel pressured, buy more than they want, or the product doesn’t deliver on expectations, they often stop trusting the brand. Customers who feel disappointed share negative reviews, talk badly about the company, or stop buying altogether. For long sales cycles common in the B2B world, building trust takes months and sometimes years. Short-term fear-inducing tactics are counterproductive.
The “Joy of Missing Out” (JOMO), aimed at combatting FOMO, describes a state of mind of being present and intentional with one’s time and purchase decisions, and finding satisfaction in those choices, even when there are known tradeoffs. A study published in the Journal of Organizational Psychology looked at consumers’ satisfaction with purchases when the participants experienced FOMO vs. JOMO. Those who experienced JOMO showed significantly higher levels of product satisfaction compared to those who experienced FOMO.
This study indicates that when we use our messages to evoke feelings of JOMO - that is, being present, fulfilled, and satisfied - our customers experience higher product satisfaction and likely better brand loyalty compared to FOMO, which elicits negative feelings of anxiety, regret and fear.
Fear Drives Avoidance
Evolutionarily we are wired to avoid negative emotions. Research on brain responses to advertising shows that emotionally negative content creates a repel reaction that can prevent emotional engagement. Explicitly negative fear-based messaging often does not result in the desired behavior. For example, public service campaigns targeting anti-smoking, texting and driving, and climate change have been largely ineffective at using fear to reduce the desired behavior.
In academia, two philosophies explain how to motivate behavior. “Avoidance motivation” is a fear-based strategy and “approach motivation” is a benefit-based strategy. “Advertising that focuses on the negative can backfire because people avoid the advertising in the first place,” explains Elise Temple, Ph.D., a neuroscientist who specializes in testing the effects of advertising on the brain. “Very rarely does fear motivate people to buy a product. An approach-based motivation is often more effective, as it increases the likelihood that the viewer will engage with the main idea, and it associates your brand with positive messages.”
Showing a problem may remind a customer why your solution matters to them if they have a pre-existing need; however, even in that scenario Temple advises making problem communication extremely brief with the majority of messaging benefit-focused. Fear-based “clickbait” headlines may deliver clicks, but customers often feel misled and disappointed - emotions that won’t lead to sales.
Can You Spot Fear in Your Messaging? Ask Yourself These Questions:
⦁ Am I using fear or FOMO to induce a desire for my product or service?
⦁ Does my messaging diminish or criticize my customers’ current experience?
⦁ Do I exaggerate the fear beyond what my customer experiences?
⦁ Am I making my customers more afraid or anxious based on my communication?
⦁ Is using fear in my message grounded in actual harm or danger to my customer? (If so, this might be a legitimate use of fear in your message)
How to Avoid Creating Messages Based on Fear
If you find yourself using fear as a strategy, focus on the benefits. Regularly talk to your customers to identify needs and wants in their own words. We often overlook this step assuming we already know this information. Only after uncovering their real challenges and desires can we craft compelling messages that describe the value we create.
Once the message is defined, check for tactics that use scarcity and fear. They can sneak into execution even when the strategy is not based in fear. [As I mentioned, writing this headline required multiple revisions!]
There are three elements that you can modify to shift from fear-based messaging to value-first messaging:
1) Language & Copy: Use positive and encouraging messaging in your copy that focuses on what customers will get by engaging in your product or service and less so what they will miss out on.
2) Tone: Consider the tone of voice, music, and color palette to create an overall mood that helps convey the benefit vs. an anxiety-inducing or negative tone that inspires doubt or comparison.
3) Imagery: Show the benefit versus the problem as a more effective way to deliver the desired purchase behavior. Visualize people capable of reaching or experiencing the desired end state versus models who are so aspirational that they create an unrealistic standard for the customer.
Here are a few simple examples of how to transition from a fear-based message to a value-first message:
Not using fear pushes us to better understand our customers’ interests and forces us to better communicate the value we offer. In doing so, we avoid creating a sense of inadequacy, hopelessness, anxiety, and negativity. When we create emotions of fulfillment, intentional decision making, and being content with what one has, we can produce greater customer satisfaction. Not only is this the right thing for our customers, but it also results in messaging that customers trust which leads to long-term business growth.
Check out the next article in this series on Creating Conscious Messages in October!
