An emotional content. a fear appeal in advertising

Anappeal is the reason to which an advertisement is directed and the purpose isto move the audience toward a goal set by the advertiser. However, the use of fear appeals in advertising is notwell accepted and can give bad views, unexpected results or have unintendednegative effects on people. Moreover, types of marketing communicationssuch as the marketing of products, services and social causes. Mostly, fearappeals commonly used in these type of marketing communications.

That is, advertisers invoke fear by identifying the negative results of not using theproduct or the negative results of engaging in unsafe behaviour.  However, fear appeals are effective inincreasing ad interest, involvement, recall, and persuasiveness.  Fear appeals are one of the most frequentlyused motivators to get people to help themselves.  In fact, fear appeals have grown in popularitybecause advertisers have found them to increase ad interest and persuasiveness.

Evidence also suggests that individuals “ better remember and more frequentlyrecall ads that portray fear than they do warm or upbeat ads or ads with noemotional content. A fear appeal in advertising is a message that is designedto scare the intended audience by describing a serious threat to them. Theadvertising tactic is to motivate the intended audience to engage or not engagein certain behaviour based upon a fear.            Advertising appeal assign to theapproach used to attract the attention of audience and to influence theirfeelings and actions toward the advertisement.

Advertising agency put a lot ofefforts into their creative advertising strategies. The objective of anadvertisement is to grab attention and advertising appeals intent to providejust the right hook. Advertising appeals are designed to create the positiveimage about those who use the product and additionally demonstrate how buyingcertain products may help consumers satisfy their needs.

Advertising appeal anduse various types of appeal to influence consumers attitude and purchasingdecisions. Advertisements with emotional appeals attempt to evoke certain emotionssuch as safety, love, happiness, trust, fear, humour, loyalty, pride, pleasure, romance, and more. Fear appeals focus on the negative results that can happenbecause of an action or inaction of individual.             Fear appeals are frequently used forproducts and even for awareness campaign. Advertisers use fear appeals topromote an immediate behaviour change, such as eating healthier, stop and not smokingand drive safely. For example, we see an ad planned by BMW to increaseconsciousness for the negative possible consequences of driving after alcoholconsumption through creating fear, by showing the impact what will happen ifyou practise that behaviour. Another fear tactic involves isolation. Fearappeals work when the recommended action is compelling and sensible.

Forexample, ads targeting smokers can be ineffective if the person does notbelieve quitting is within his or her reach.  For instance, advertisements focusing onsmokers can be insufficient if the individual does not think stopping is insidehis or her compass. Furthermore, fear appeals increase interest and areremembered more and the use of moderate level of fear is usually the mosteffective tactic.             Many explanations have been proposedrelated to fear appeal, including the fear as acquired drive model, parallelprocess model, and protection motivation theory. However, the extended parallelprocess model (EPPM) theory takes the best of some of the other theories, extends the research, and helps in explaining the effectiveness of an appeal tofear. The extended parallel process model (EPPM) is a structure developed byKim Witte which is effort to conclude how individuals will behave when meetingwith fear causing stimuli. It is commonly used in health communicationcampaigns when a message is trying to convince audience members to adopt ahealthy behaviour.

In order for fear appeal based campaigns to be effective, advertiser must generate a moderately high level of fear and a higher level of selfefficacy and followed up with response efficacy. The message is useless whenthe audience feels that there is a higher level of fear than efficacy.            EPPM is concerned with how perceivedthreats and perceived efficacy can cause behaviour change based upon fear. Asstated by the theory, a perceived threat consists of perceived likelihood ofbeing harmed or influenced, which is your perception of the chance of thethreat actually happening, and perceived severity, which is your perception ofthe seriousness of the threat. Perceived efficacy consists of response efficacy, which is how you perceived the safety and effectiveness of the recommendedresponse to the threat, and self-efficacy, which is how easy or simply youbelieve you can engage in the recommended course of action. Basically, thetheory disagree that the perceived threat determines the desire to act, and theperceived efficacy determines in what way you will act. As mentioned by thetheory, appeal to fear will only be effective if there is a strong perceivedthreat and a strong efficacy component.