Category: Fundamentals

The Ambiguous Success of Fear Based Advertising

The Ambiguous Success of Fear Based Advertising

If you asked a layperson what they knew about advertising they might say “sex sells.” That’s been the summary of advertising for a very long time. But, fear may be as powerful a biological motivator as sex. Does fear sell?

Yes. Well, maybe.

Advertisers use fear in two different ways. They either build it up or broadcast their ability to free you from it. The fear building technique is often used by PSAs to discourage certain behavior. The freeing technique is used by brands to push products. This type of ad often seems less sinister. Think of the deodorant or  mouthwash ads that broadcast their ability to keep you from the fear of smelling bad. That’s not so awful, and these ads typically skate under the radar because they feel so much less traumatic than an anti-smoking or anti-drinking message.

However, that isn’t to say ads using the freeing technique can’t be harmful. After all, Listerine essentially invented the idea of bad breath as a medical concern to sell more of their surgical antiseptic and made us all a little more neurotic in the process.

Regardless of which category of fear an ad falls into, it would be wise to consider the Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM). The EPPM is a framework for understanding how people will react to fear-inducing stimuli like fear based advertisements. According to the EPPM, there are four inputs that determine message success: self-efficacy, response efficacy, susceptibility, and severity. Susceptibility and severity refer to an individual’s belief in how likely and how serious the advertised danger is. While self-efficacy and response efficacy refer to their belief they can perform the actions needed to prevent the danger and that those actions will avert the risk.

One might think the higher the susceptibility and severity the better the ad will do. But actually, according to the model, when fear is too high (and efficacy too low) the message will be less effective because people will avoid the fear by tuning it out. Thus, the optimal combination of the elements involves efficacy measures that are at least as high as danger levels.

Even with the EPPM, the ad profession is divided on the success of fear based advertising. The results are inconsistent. Is it because of poor execution, differences between products (for instance between low and high involvement products), or perhaps even a subtlety with branding where fear based advertisers acquire negative emotions? These are all plausible explanations.

But, even if we were to find some optimal formula for success we haven’t discussed the ethical questions yet. Generally advertising seeks to improve people’s lives. We might overemphasize a need here or a want there, but good products have an innate value. We’re not in the business of pushing bad products because that hurts everybody in the long run. Can we still say there’s inherent value in a product if it solves a fear we had to create in order to sell it? 

If you’re going to use fear based advertising tread lightly.

When you can’t talk about taste – An Analysis Of Coors Advertising

You know what you don’t see much of when you watch a Coors ad? Comments about taste. Advertisement after advertisement focuses on the bottle, or the temperature of the beer or, if they’re feeling really adventurous, on the bottle that can tell you the temperature of the beer.

Of course, there’s a reason Coors avoids talking about it. The product doesn’t taste very good. The beer snob in me loves to rip on Coors’ advertising, but the advertising analyst in me appreciates their strategy. While Coors’ doesn’t talk much about their taste they still try to convey the idea indirectly. For instance, their ads bring up Coors’ long history to imply expertise and give credence to their beers’ quality. In other ads they’ll mention that they use pure Rocky Mountain water, another mark meant to confer quality.

In fact, it’s only when you begin to place all the ads together that you see the tremendous gap in their advertising. But leaving that gap is an intelligent choice. Few people are going to be convinced that Coors is delicious (or, you know, even good). But, taste isn’t the only important aspect of beer to consumers. Beer is also viewed as something that refreshes and relaxes us, and Coors’ advertising targets those areas. What could be more refreshing than an ice cold beer? Well a Coors of course – it’s brewed with ice cold water from mountain snow and the bottles tell you when it’s ready! The can’s designed to get you refreshed quicker than the competition! 

More or less, Coors strategy is understandable. But, I also want to look at it with respect to rest of the market and build off the topic of repositioning discussed previously. Why hasn’t another huge brand like Budweiser attacked them? The big producers are being squeezed by craft breweries, so taking market share from each other may be the key to maintaining or growing revenue. Just from a game theory perspective you’d think it would make sense. When you think about it Budweiser, has a history just as rich as Coors’ and operates in a pretty similar fashion. It also has the same losing proposition against craft beers (even though for some reason that’s who they attacked in their super bowl ad). So why don’t they seize this opportunity to reposition Coors as a beer that needs gimmicks?

Well, Budweiser also may have qualms about focusing too much on taste, but at this point I see it almost as a binary choice for consumers between those brands – they aren’t competing against craft beers anymore. That battle was lost. Instead, they’re competing against each other. It would be pretty easy for Budweiser to run that kind of campaign.

Here’s a simple tagline:

“When you make good beer you don’t need to talk about the bottle it comes in.”

Edit: an astute user pointed out that Schlafly had an ad that made fun of bottle technology a few years ago. It’s not exactly what I’d advocate for, but it’s still worth a look.

Tylenol repositions the competition

“For the millions who should not take aspirin”

As anyone in marketing can tell you, unseating category leaders is difficult. That’s why Pepsi has trailed Coca-Cola for decades and why Tide has remained the leading detergent since the 1940s. It’s not impossible though, and one of the best ways to advertise against a category leader is to use their brand presence in your own favor. The best way to do that is to run a repositioning campaign.

In essence, repositioning the competition requires comparative advertising, but it is not simply comparative advertising. Comparative ads evaluate products side-by-side. Repositioning ads try to take an attribute of the competitors product and shift it into a weakness.  Then they show how their own product fills that gap. Most of a repositioning advertisement should be devoted to your competitor’s product, and not even the product as it exists in reality, but as it exists in the mind of consumers. Only once the ad has succeeded in framing their competitors’ products attributes as weaknesses do they introduce their own product. One of the most famous repositioning campaigns was done by Tylenol. In this advertisement Tylenol isn’t even mentioned until the third paragraph!

Tylenol+repositioning+Aspirin

Let’s take a closer look at the ad. “For the millions who should not take aspirin” is a very interesting line. Many people today are still unaware of the differences between over the counter analgesics, before this ad even fewer were. It’s interesting because it’s alarming enough to draw in the uninformed. Notice, too, that the ad doesn’t say Tylenol is better than aspirin. It doesn’t even directly say that Tylenol is better for the stomach. Right now, it’s only saying some people shouldn’t use aspirin. It’s avoiding those comparative statements because comparative statements can conflict with consumers pre-held notions, and if they do they are likely to get dismissed.¹ Instead, the ad tries to convey new information – the instances in which taking aspirin is detrimental and, as it builds that case, it lets the consumers decide for themselves that Tylenol is better. That’s the essence of repositioning.

Remember, Tylenol was doing more than just creating niches for itself to occupy, which can also be an effective way to gain market share. Instead, it went beyond that strategy, put those holes together, and used them to reposition aspirin as a brand that was harmful to the stomach. In fact, Tylenol was so successful in conveying this information that it gained considerable market share and eventually the product actually displaced the aspirin-based medicines and became the best selling analgesic.
Footnotes

1. This is the result of confirmation bias which causes people to seek information that confirms their opinions and to dismiss information which contradicts them.

Why Kleenex wants you to call it a tissue (kinda)

The names Kleenex, Band-aid, Duct tape, and Aspirin all are somewhat interchangeable with the category of products they represent. In a parallel universe the manufacturers would greet this with unbridled joy. After all, you need to capture a lot of mindshare to have your brand name (Band-aid, for instance) stand in for the product category’s name (adhesive bandage). But unfortunately, after a certain level that success is a bad thing because of our legal system.

In U.S. law, as well as in many other countries, once a brand name has come to represent the category as a whole it loses trademark protection unless the company that owns the trademark takes active steps to counteract the trademark erosion. If they fail, anyone will be able to use their name. In fact, that has already happened to Aspirin.¹ It’s also happened to cellophane, escalator, linoleum, videotape, and trampoline, all of which previously referred to specific brands. It’s also happened to hoover. And jacuzzi… The list could go on for quite a while.

What steps can brands take to prevent this genericide? Two examples stick out. In 2003 Xerox produced an ad that read “When you use ‘Xerox’ the way you use ‘aspirin,’ we get a headache.’” Band-aid also made a subtle change to their jingle from “I am stuck on Band-aids, ‘cause Band-aids stuck on me” to “I’m stuck on Band-aid brand, ‘cause Band-aids stuck on me”. For now those efforts seem to be enough.

Most recently this has been an issue for one of the biggest companies in the world: Google. They must have gotten very nervous when the term google was adopted as a verb. Which explains their efforts to keep it out of the dictionary. Eventually, they were successful in getting the Oxford-English dictionary to restrict the meaning of “google” to using the Google search engine only. In the decade since it seems like their efforts were worthwhile as googling something has acquired a much more specific colloquial meaning.

One does have to wonder just how successful these companies would like their efforts to be though, because they’re discouraging a lot of free advertising.

Footnotes:

  1. Because of the split legal system aspirin has become generic in the U.S. but is still protected elsewhere.