The Discovery of FOMO

My first encounter with FOMO — The Fear of Missing Out, was back in 1996. While conducting a series of focus groups for a client, I noted a significant shift in consumer behavior unfolding before my eyes. Brand loyalty, the “holy grail” of the marketing world, was beginning to wane, replaced by an obsessive interest in the latest novelty and a new openness to try unfamiliar brands.

This trend caught my eye, leading me to initiate a series of studies on the topic. By 1997, I’d named the phenomenon “Fear of Missing Out — FOMO.” I first presented it at an Israeli Marketing Association conference. I took the stage and showcased a slide bearing just the words: “Fear of Missing Out.” The 300 attendees smiled in recognition. At that moment, I realized I was onto something big. Even early on, it was evident that this was a pivotal development in psychology in general and, more specifically, marketing psychology. Over the next few years, I delved deep into FOMO, studying it as a socio-cultural phenomenon, a human motivator, and a personal characteristic.

After several more years of research, I published my first academic paper introducing the term “Fear of Missing Out” in the Journal of Brand Management in 2000. The article extensively discussed the marketing implications of FOMO. Peer reviewers commented, “If the author is correct, this is an earthquake.”

The rising prominence of FOMO brought about a new marketing reality. By 1998, I began to develop a new marketing and branding methodology designed to cater to consumers driven by FOMO. I termed it “Think Short Marketing,” a short-term marketing approach, contrasting the then-dominant “Think Long Marketing.” A cornerstone of this methodology was the creation and management of Short-Term Brands (STB).

Subsequent articles I wrote were featured on various marketing and branding websites, some even translated into several languages. In 2002, I released a report titled “Think Short: Short-Term Brands Revolutionize Branding,” elaborating extensively on FOMO. By 2004, I penned a chapter on FOMO for the academic anthology “Consumer Behavior: Implications for Marketing Strategies,” edited by G. Radha Krishna, published by ICFAI University Press. I also dedicated a chapter to FOMO in my book (in Hebrew) “Unfair Advantage — Winning Strategic Management in a World of MBA Clones,” published in 2005 and translated into English in 2008 (“Outsmart the MBA Clones,” Paramount Market Publishing).

Around the same time, venture capitalist Patrick J. McGinnis, then a student, wrote about FOMO in a 2004 Harvard Business School student newspaper article. He claims to have identified the phenomena and coined the acronym FOMO, unaware of my prior publications. McGinnis certainly contributed enormously to popularizing the term.

Back then, FOMO was still in its infancy. The launch of Facebook in 2004 and the iPhone in 2007 amplified FOMO into the colossal phenomenon we recognize today.

Smartphones and social networks expose us to a constant stream of up-to-date information, albeit filtered, about the lives of our acquaintances and friends. We learn about their successes, joys, pleasures, the places they visit, the restaurants where they eat, including selected menu items, the shows they watch, what they wear, and so on. In addition, through smartphones, we are flooded with information about products and services that might interest us. We can be present in multiple places simultaneously. Everything becomes accessible 24/7, all year round, and we begin to get used to the idea that purchasing options and other opportunities are available all the time and everywhere.

In 2011, an MIT researcher named Sherry Turkle wrote an influential book titled “Alone Together,” a broader exploration of how technology is changing how we interact, addressing the FOMO phenomenon. Her book triggered a new wave of studies. One was conducted by the international advertising network J. Walter Thompson — JWT. They approached me, and I collaborated with them and other researchers in universities and research institutes worldwide to understand the phenomenon’s growing power.

In 2013, the term “FOMO” was recognized in the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, and this act was essentially a stamp of approval on the importance of the term to our culture. In recent years, The Fear of Missing Out has gained momentum and has become one of the most discussed and researched concepts in social psychology, personal psychology, and marketing psychology. I am credited in many sources as the one who identified the fear of missing out, among others, in the “Fear of Missing Out” Wikipedia entry.