February 15, 2017

Stoking a fear and promising a fix

I’ve been insistent that everybody needs to pay attention to politics now, which is being conducted with greater cynicism than technology marketing ever could be. But in this particular post, political and technology marketing (among other kinds) are compared on a more even basis.

Donald Trump:

This is actually a time-honored pattern, pursued by (among others):

While fear-and-fix is a powerful strategy, it’s not easy to pull off, because it involves establishing both sides of a partial contradiction:

Approaches to resolving this paradox typically fall into one or more of three buckets:

Let’s consider some examples.

1. Modern Republicans excel at stoking fears among US voters, about threats as diverse as:

But fear-and-fix is a long-standing, bipartisan strategy. Two of the more famous examples in US history, bookending the Eisenhower Administration, were:

And I still haven’t figured out what Wall Street is doing that Bernie Sanders is so upset about.

2. Starting in the 1960s, IBM perfected sales messaging along the lines:

Ulrich Weil is credited with labeling this strategy as FUD — Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. The phrase stuck.

There was a lot of truth to that FUD messaging, and IBM was well-nigh unbeatable as a result. But things changed (although many accounts are true-blue IBM loyalists to this day). What happened? In a nutshell:

Of course, these dynamics aren’t IBM-specific; they play out all over the enterprise (or possibly-enterprise) IT market to this day.

3. Fear-and-fix messaging was also a huge part of consumer mass marketing, right from its beginning. Patent medicine sellers — aka snake-oil salesmen — offered bogus cures to real or imaginary ailments. Eventually, the marketing mantra became “Find a need, and then fill it” — but “Find” was often changed to “Create”. For example, long-tolerated hygiene challenges were repositioned as intolerable embarrassments. One late and great example is the long-running, somewhat self-mocking Ring around the collar campaign, in which one narrow laundry-washing challenge supported a detergent’s whole brand identity.

Consumers are now more cynical than they were in the past, and better informed. Claims that are repeatedly proven bogus eventually lose their ability to persuade. Still, fear-and-fix remains an important strategy in areas where disproof is somehow difficult, for example in the political and religious arenas.

4. Speaking of politics and consumer marketing, there’s a wonderful fictional example of fear-and-fix. Please see the first few seconds of the following clip, which is the lead-in to a famous — albeit horrifically unmelodious — song, “Trouble in River City”.

5. As for religion — well, some of the oldest pagan religions seem to have focused on preventing natural disasters, droughts and so on. The efficacy of those solutions was generally oversold.

In more recent millennia, religions have offered to solve various post-death difficulties. Some of those claims are dubious as well.

Comments

2 Responses to “Stoking a fear and promising a fix”

  1. Patterns of political persuasion | Strategic Messaging on September 16th, 2018 3:08 am

    […] points are spelled out across several posts, with subjects such as fear, outrage, or negative emotions in […]

  2. Accusations of recklessness or insufficient caring | Strategic Messaging on July 6th, 2019 1:48 am

    […] fear-oriented messaging, for example in the areas of immigration, national security or economic […]

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