Marketers know a trick that is so powerful that it must be used sparingly.
Politicians rehearse the same tactic to motivate the masses to act as they please.
They use paranoia and fear to disrupt continuity and drive behaviors. The tactic works incredibly well, if executed correctly.
The 5 Steps To Fear Mongering:
- Pick your danger- go for high perceived susceptibility, the probability of an individual experiencing your threat du jour, and high perceived severity, the extent of harm if an individual experiences the threat.
- Develop your fear appeal, your persuasive message to the people that arouses fear. Wording is important: the fear level must be kept between low and moderate levels, but not too scary, as higher levels can negatively influence persuasion, or trigger a defensive reaction (paralyzed by fear).
- Determine the response behavior you want your crowd to execute- vote, protest, etc.. It doesn’t need to be a linear path to eliminating the perceived danger, you just need to illustrate how the new behavior will alleviate the unpleasant feeling of fear. You can take some liberties here- allude, contrast current conditions to the post-behavior fear-free utopia, anything to sell the behavior. Just ensure that your followers feel they have efficacy to solve the perceived danger.
- Identify your audience– those who are upset with the status quo. Note that they do not necessarily need to hold the fear you’ll introduce, but it helps if there are tangential fears established by normative beliefs within their social groups. The more people they know that also hold the fear, the more likely they are to perform the behavior.
- Spread your fear mongering message among your targeted audience loudly, proudly, and repetitively until it’s incontrovertibly true.
To be clear, fear is an emotion and danger is a cognitive assessment of threats. And we really struggle to differentiate the two.
We must allow more time to acknowledge research, assess the impact of our decisions and non-decisions, and separate fact from emotion.
Until then, fear sells, and we’re all buying.
