SUVs, handwash and

FOMO: how the

advertising industry
embraced fear
Jacques Peretti
Sun 6 Jul 2014 12.00 EDT

Advertising is about selling

'freedom from fear' and targeting
consumers' anxieties with products
that alleviate those worries –
whether it's fear of disease, attack
or of missing out

Sex doesn't sell, it's fear. In the first

episode of Mad Men (Smoke gets
in your eyes) Don Draper outlines
the appeal of fear as a tool for
selling with chilling clarity.
"Advertising is based on one thing:
happiness," he calmly tells his
clients. "And do you know what
happiness is? … It's freedom from
fear."

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This has been the simple quest of

consumerism for the past half-
century: to pinpoint with laser-like
accuracy the anxieties of the
consumer at any given moment,
from the nebulous (economic
insecurity) to the specific (bird flu).
One former marketing executive
from a soft drinks multinational
even told me how they would
brainstorm these anxieties on a
"whiteboard of worry". The
purpose? To brilliantly, cunningly
hone a product that offers
temporary "freedom from fear",
temporary because a new fear and
a new product will be on their way
soon. Here are some of the ways it
is done.

How 9/11 sold us

the Hummer – as
a suburban car

After the September 11 attacks,

market research suggested the
public were now terrified of "the
outside", generally, and an
opportunity was spotted by an
extraordinary French
anthropologist called Clotaire
Rapaille, who lives in a big, spooky
chateau. For more than 30 years,
he's been advising companies such
as General Motors, Kellogg's and
Philip Morris on how to exploit what
he calls, scarily, the consumer's
"reptilian brain". This reptilian brain
could be triggered to sell cars, and
Rapaille believed a military vehicle
designed for war could now be sold
to bankers in golfing jumpers. Yes,
the Hummer was coming to
Clapham. "It's a weapon," he told
me. "The message is: 'Don't mess
with me. If you want to bump into
me I'm going to crush you and I'm
going to kill you.'"

With people fearful of the outside

world, the car now needed to offer
sanctuary. "It gives me superiority
in a very dangerous world," Rapaille
says. The aggressive Humvee
mindset spawned a less antisocial
alternative: the SUV (sport utility
vehicle), with its high-up military-
style vantage point, from which to
spot approaching danger, and with
macho bumpers signalling solidity
and indestructibility. Even the cup
holders, says Rapaille, are not really
about holding cups: they reinforce
a psychological signal of stability.
SUV sales soared and in the early
noughties accounted for more than
20% of all American car sales.

In reality, SUVs were the opposite

of the message they sent out: far
more likely to roll over than smaller,
lower cars. But the illusion of safety
is what mattered. Freedom from
fear, even if that freedom is a
chimera, sells the thing to us.

Where it all began:

bad breath

"Jane has a pretty face. Men notice

her lovely figure but never linger
long. Because Jane has one big
minus on her report card –
halitosis: bad breath."
(1950s advertisement for
Listerine.)

Classic Listerine advert

Stanley B Resor took over the

advertising agency J Walter
Thompson in 1916 with a vision of
humanity, as a writhing mass,
jostling for food and safety, but
united by one thing: fear, according
to marketing expert Joel Sachs.
Resor wanted to utilise the latest
developments in European
psychoanalysis (Freud) and
believed constructing fear and then
providing the product solution was
the key to modern consumerism.
So, when the producers of an
obscure antiseptic called Listerine
were looking for a new market,
Resor had the answer.

Listerine was going to be the cure

for an international epidemic of
unimaginable proportions. What
could this terrible disease be? It
had a medical name and
everything: it was halitosis and
we've been gargling ever since.

How bird flu sold soap

There's virtually no difference

between conventional soap and
antibacterial soap. The traditional
bar, which hasn't changed since
the 1940s, kills almost as many
germs as the antibacterial. But we
don't believe that – and we have
bird flu and Sars to thank. Before
selling soap through fear of germs,
it was sold as a luxury: Imperial
Leather and the soap-suddy
pleasure of the long bath taken by
the blonde woman on a break from
the Flake ad.

But antibacterial soaps changed all

that: hygiene was the new war zone
and the genius of the idea was to
convince us that every domestic
surface was teeming with
salmonella, E coli and baby-
threatening diseases of every kind,
and so requiring manic spraying
every 15 seconds. Soap went from
the bathroom to the kitchen, and
OCD had an unwitting enabler.

Barry Shafe, Cussons' former head

of product development and the
man behind Carex's launch in the
UK, tells me the background noise
of pandemic fear was all that was
needed to drive consumers to
antibacterial soap. They didn't
need to ramp up the fear with
advertising because real fear
sells far better than invented fear.
But it also helps if your soap is blue
(medical-looking) and comes in a
squirty, transparent square bottle
(square and transparent equals,
wait for it, honesty).

Jumping the shark: the

Brickhouse Child Locator

Here is one you would think would

never get past the Dragons' Den
pitching stage, but it did. "Every
parent's worst nightmare," begins
the advert. A mum is darting
frantically around the children's
playground searching for her
missing son. Paedomania is rife.
But thank God! He is wearing an
electronic tag, a Brickhouse Child
Locator, to be precise. Some fear-
stoking simply goes too far: we
don't mind being scared (we
actually enjoy the experience of a
rollercoaster ride) but child
abduction, no thanks. The
kiddie tag never took off, thank
heavens – the batteries alone
would have cost a fortune.

The damsel in distress and

the hero product

Everything from kitchen roll to

chocolate bars has been cast in the
role of hero, riding in to save the
day and banish the fear. We are too
knowing nowadays to buy the six-
pack chiselled hero so the hero is
now invariably semi-comic or ironic
(the You're So Money Supermarket
Dad, and the Juan Sheet kitchen
roll Zorro).

Juan Sheet from the Plenty kitchen roll

advertisements

Because the damsel in distress is

the consumer, we can now be
rescued from absolutely anything:
roadside breakdown heroes rescue
women (important that it is
a woman) on dimly lit backstreets,
sure, but beer can also come to the
rescue of thirst, washing powder to
the rescue of parents, gravy
granules to the rescue of Sunday
lunch. It is ridiculous but we fall for
it.

'Consumers remember
basically one thing and
one thing only" – so make
sure that thing is scary'

Bob Ehrlich helped launch the

bestselling drug of all time: lipitor, a
powerful statin used to treat high
cholesterol. The reality of heart
disease and stroke is that they
have multiple, complex causes, but
many of us believe cholesterol is
the only one that counts.

So how did cholesterol get the rap?

Because the drugs industry had
developed drugs … that lowered
cholesterol. And boy, they needed
to sell them somehow.

"It's an interesting problem we had,

which was we couldn't say lipitor
prevents heart attacks," says
Ehrlich. "So we decided to focus on
what we could focus on, which was
we're the best at lowering
cholesterol. And we went out and
advertised that."

A committee of the National

Institutes of Health in the US
subsequently lowered the
threshold at which cholesterol was
considered too high. Six of the
seven committee doctors who
made that key decision had
financial ties to Pfizer – who made
lipitor.

Of course, fear of risk is actually

the bestselling tool of all: it is the
basis of the entire insurance
industry, whose profit base
is predicated on the fact that fear is
a very real emotion selling the
product, but the statistical
probability of anything actually
happening, well, that is
infinitesimal. Fear through risk sells
us a product we don't even use.
Genius.

Vitamin Water can cure

cancer

Rohan Oza went to Harrow School,

but can now be found residing in
his luxury hillside penthouse
overlooking Los Angeles, thanks to
the product that distills fear
marketing into a single bottle of
sugary water. It made Oza and
his business partner, rapper
50 Cent, a lot of money. How
much? "It's a new agreement we
have. I don't tell people how much
money he made and he doesn't
shoot me," he says.

Vitamin Water

When Coke bought Vitamin Water,

in 2007, says lawyer Stephen
Gardner, extraordinary health
claims were made. "It would inhibit
growth of tumours, which is
double-talk for prevent cancer, of
the skin, lung, oral cavity,
oesophagus, stomach, liver,
prostate and other organs," he
says. "Awesome. But not true."

Coke dialled down the health

claims but in 2009, the Advertising
Standards Authority said it couldn't
even be considered "healthy"
because a bottle had almost as
much sugar as a can of coke.
Vitamin Water had been sold to
alleviate fear, but now ended up
justifying it.

Fear of missing out

Not all fear-selling is about the

horrors of bad breath and
a potential terrorist attack. Some –
indeed the most effective
campaigns – target the plain old
fear of missing out. Fear of missing
out drives the upgrade culture
around smartphones and
technology but even applies to
embracing danger. New technology
(recording and posting your
thrilling life – snowboarding, Rio
carnival, bungee jumping) and
adventure holidays that service
these thrills, are about ticking off
the bucket list before you are 21.
Why? Because if you haven't
looked fear in the face and enjoyed
it, you haven't lived.

Jacques Peretti's series The Men

Who Made Us Spend is on BBC2
on Saturday. You can watch all
three episodes in the series on the
BBC iPlayer

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