FEAR APPEAL IN ADVERTISING AND ITS EFFECT IN NEPAL
Date
2024
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Shanker Dev Campus
Abstract
Advertising has become one of the most important commercial activities in the modern
competitive environment. Companies spend a large part of their budget to produce and
run advertisements for promotions to communicate information about their company
and products. Companies hope that consumers will purchase their products due to the
advertisements, which deliver messages about a certain brand and its products.
The marketers use rational and emotional appeal to motivate the consumers to purchase
product. Within emotional appeal the fear appeal is one of the mostly used appeals in
the advertisement.
This study aims to analyse the effectiveness of fear appeal advertisement where
different factors are involved in the message which are effective to create the attention,
interest, desire and action by the consumers.
The factors under the fear appeal advertisements are Amount of depicted fear, depicted
susceptibility and Efficacy statements which are defined as the independent variables
of the fear appeal advertisements which will affect the dependent variables; Attention,
Interest, Desire and Action.
An Experimental survey was conducted through questionnaire distribution for this
study. The 400 respondents were shown the print ads and asked to fill up the
questionnaire and the basis of respondent selection was convenient sampling. The
questionnaires were distributed among the audience in Kathmandu city.
The study showed that Fear appeal is effective to attract the attention of the audience
but doesn’t contribute much to the action or the purchase of the product.
The audiences prefer creative, short and problem oriented ads, humorous ads than fear
appeal advertisements.
It showed that adults and older age audience are more convinced by the fear appeal
advertisements while the younger ones below 20 are least convinced by the fear appeal
and there is slight difference in the behavior of the males and females in the
effectiveness of fear appeal in the advertisement.