Nothing spreads like Fear.
Darr Ke Aage Jeet Hai (for the salesman though).
In a life insurance ad, a husband is hesitating to sign the insurance papers. He tells his wife, “Oh nothing will happen to me, I’m here for you and am I not earning enough to provide for us?” to which the salesman says, “Yes, you might be there for their present. But what about their future? Life is so uncertain, you never know when something bad might happen, changing their lives forever. What if it affects your daughter’s education, wedding, their whole future?”
That’s when the husband imagines his family, without him, distraught and helpless and immediately signs the papers.
Did you just notice what the decision making point for the husband was?
Fear. It was the fear, induced by the insurance salesman, that influenced his thinking, decision making process and the final purchase.
Look at the TV advertisement below. It’s a Policy Bazaar ad, that went as far as showing a man dressed as Yamraj, who on your deathbed will make you regret that you didn’t buy a life insurance policy and so your family will suffer!
Of course, a life/health insurance policy is one of the most important protection plans to spend your money on. But is fear the only motivating factor for us to buy one? David Ogilvy, the guru of advertising, said it’s better for ads to sell hope rather than fear; highlight the solution rather than the problem; create amazement rather than shock.
Insurance is not the only sector that does this though. If you look at any of the Fair & Lovely ads, the fear of rejection for a “dark” girl is what pushes her towards the fairness cream.
Consider the earliest ads of Saffola Oil with visuals of “a husband being wheeled into an OT with the background sounds of an ambulance siren”, where the whole communication pathos revolved around fear. Yes, it did make its customers buy their oil, but it was solely because of the fear that if they don’t, they or their loved one would die of a heart disease. Was that really how Saffola wanted to acquire more customers? By scaring them into buying their product?
There are so many examples we can see in front of us that induce fear in us and drive our buying decisions. All of that is possible only because of one phenomenon that we’ve been constantly talking about: Emotional Contagion.
So, we have now seen what the phenomenon functions like in our minds, how even popular media has corroborated the existence and power of emotional contagion. Lastly, we saw how advertisers use it to induce happiness or fear in the consumers’ minds and drive their purchases.
I think somewhere it makes us realize that we don't live or function in isolation, as much as someone would like to. More often that not, we don’t even realize that we are being affected by someone else’s mood or even that ours is affecting them. With the knowledge of emotional contagion, we can probably be more mindful of this and react accordingly.
- Soumya R Kumar
soumyakumar.20@micamail.in