Special issue editorial: Fear appeals in social marketing campaigns

✍ Scribed by John R. Rossiter; Sandra Jones

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2004
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 33 KB
• Volume: 21
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0742-6046
• DOI: 10.1002/mar.20038

✦ Synopsis

This special issue of Psychology & Marketing presents a collection of articles on a perennially studied but still controversial topic-the use of fear appeals in social marketing campaigns.

In the first article, Laros and Steenkamp devise and test a measure of consumers' fear of genetically modified food (GMF). GMF is a hotly debated issue worldwide at present. They use the measure in a survey of Dutch consumers and find that, in that country, consumers from all sectors of society are more fearful of GMF than of two other new food types, functional food and organic food. Laros and Steenkamp also identify some of the antecedents and consequences of fear of GMF. As the authors point out, the GMF issue warrants international research and a critical variable is fear.

In the second article, Dillard and Anderson present the first of two articles in this Special Issue that address the important and unresolved theoretical issue of how fear appeals work (the other article that does this is that of Rossiter and Thornton). The fear appeal in this study concerns the dangers of influenza and recommends obtaining a free vaccination. Dillard and Anderson demonstrate that fear appeals activate the behavioral inhibition system (BIS) in the brain and that individuals who have a chronic, trait-like tendency toward behavioral inhibition experience more fear from the same level of threat than do individuals with a low chronic BIS tendency. The investigators then show, using intention to obtain a flu vaccination (among those who have not already had one) as the measure of persuasion, that the amount of perceived fear produced by the message, as well as the peak level of fear produced, are both sig-