It’s time to set the record straight on “fear marketing.” The “fear marketing” cases held up as examples in so many books, articles, and websites don’t actually involve fear at all. They really fall under four different emotions: fear, anxiety, disgust, and shame. Dig a little deeper and you find these are complex, uniquely human emotions with sociological dimensions—being afraid of feeling ashamed, feeling ashamed of being sad, being ashamed of feeling disgust, even being ashamed on someone else’s behalf. We’re no strangers to being ashamed of crying, for instance.
So how do these negative emotions differ from one another?
Fear is the most powerful of them all—if you can genuinely frighten people—because it is the most primal. When a person is afraid, every other emotion, and even biological needs like hunger and sleep, is suspended for a while. To create fear, the threat has to be identifiable, shown clearly, and paired with the belief that it can be removed. (That last part isn’t always necessary; a person may act simply because they’re afraid and want to avoid harm.)
Interestingly, one of the best marketers of fear is Volvo. And yet we think of Volvo as a “safety” brand, don’t we? That’s because Volvo does it so well that most of its advertising runs on a positive theme. The turning point in the story is what sends fear through the roof. By the end, the thing you remember most is that terrifying possibility.
Look at the photo here. There’s no explicit danger in it, yet the parents among us have already registered that the child is running toward the road—because they’ve lived it many times and carry a vivid memory of that fear. Even though the man is smiling, the woman’s posture and the blurred figure of the child in front create an extraordinary emotional equation. A genuine work of art.
The catch with fear is that it’s a more momentary emotion. A person doesn’t stay afraid for weeks—often not even for a full day. So the brand either has to sit inside a situational fear-and-safety equation, or keep pumping the fear continuously.
We’ve seen a clear example of fear failing to land in the realm of disaster preparedness. In earthquake-prone regions, almost everyone “knows” a major quake is coming, yet very few retrofit their homes or keep an emergency kit ready. The fear is genuinely enormous—and on paper, the remedy exists. But without a recent tremor to reactivate it, and with the “fix” feeling impossibly large (who tears down and rebuilds their house on a hunch?), that fear rarely converts into action. When removing the fear would require something monumental, people simply don’t believe it can be “conveniently” removed—and so they don’t move.
Anti-limescale tablets for washing machines, on the other hand, have to keep reminding you they exist. That’s been their whole game for years: “Skip us and your machine dies.” (Think of the classic Calgon promise.) So what emotion are these brands leaning on now? Why did they trade fear for disgust? We’ll make that clear as we work through the other negative emotions.
Why is anxiety the most useful emotion for brands? Insurance companies, baby products, cleaning products, anything in the health space, and lately the food category are all, in one way or another, born into a state of anxiety.
While fear has a clear object and a more immediate effect, anxiety draws its power from the ambiguity of its object and lasts far longer. Unlike fear, new information in a state of anxiety can make people more anxious rather than calmer (and usually does). Brands are already experienced at manufacturing fears and anxieties that don’t exist. Anxiety is the most useful emotion because the person has to make an effort to remove its source—and, crucially, that removal feels possible. In short: just by choosing the right brand, you can put your anxieties to rest.
The most useful type here is what I’d call “indirect anxiety.” This is when a brand, while saying something positive, quietly evokes a negative one. Think of the Vegan or Gluten-Free products lining the shelves. They send a positive message, yet they plant an anxiety about the whole category.
But sometimes this backfires for the category’s own future. That’s the single reason Coca-Cola deliberately let its Zero line grow: as long as that black can exists, the red one is framed as the sugary, fattening, unhealthy option.
One recent ad that handles anxiety beautifully comes from the diaper category—Pampers-style campaigns that tie the fit of a diaper to how freely a baby learns to move and walk, building on a deeply felt, long-running parental anxiety about the child’s development.
Disgust is largely physical at its root—tied to food and hygiene. Its most basic job is to keep us from eating spoiled food, to protect our bodily balance, and to keep us alive. It still holds an important place in our lives. We smell food to tell whether it’s gone off; when we catch a bad odor, our face scrunches up and we want to get away from—or get rid of—the source. Disgust also keeps us away from things that threaten our personal hygiene.
Over time, this function took on a sociological dimension. Moral values and social norms entered the picture, and we began to feel disgust toward things that aren’t physically “dirty” at all. When someone cuts in line ahead of us, our anger is often laced with disgust. A cheating spouse, a relative caught in a lie, a breach of etiquette, a broken taboo—depending on the society and the moral code we’ve absorbed, any of these can provoke it. The key point is that much of what we call “disgusting” here is learned, not innate: it is a product of social conditioning, and it shifts from culture to culture and era to era.
One of the sharpest examples of using disgust in its social dimension is PETA’s long-running campaign to make wearing fur socially shameful—turning what was once a status symbol into a moral taboo, and making the wearer, not just the product, the object of disgust.
Beyond that, Domestos—a name often filed under “fear marketing”—used disgust for years by depicting germs. But in recent years the brand recognized the risk of tying itself to the very things people find revolting, and as of 2024 it swapped its central visual from germs to a dragon. To my mind, this is one of those cases that ought to be taught in universities for both its causes and its consequences.
Shame, unlike the others, has no biological basis. It is believed to have emerged much later in our evolution. We used to see it in detergent and bleach ads. Should a yellowed shirt or a stain that wouldn’t come out really shame us? Do the things that shamed us in the past still shame us now? That, I suspect, depends on a society’s moral fabric and the specific situation. Nakedness can be shameful—yet the nakedness of someone in a hospital bed carries no such feeling.
In light of all this, it is fair to argue that negative emotions matter enormously to brands because of their power to prompt a counter-action. Even so, I am genuinely unsure whether an insurer does better work by showing the crash and associating itself with catastrophe, or by showing the positive outcomes it protects. Some insurers’ recent ads feel like exactly what they shouldn’t be—and when you factor in shrinking purchasing power, the staged drama can come across, to put it mildly, as “cartoonish.”
