Fear-based marketing: Can 'scary' translate into sales?

For marketers, the notion of blending blood and brand has long been considered taboo.

Death and gore make people feel afraid, and fear instills bad feelings towards an associated commercial product. It’s why you just don’t see many logos on the bag of chips, car or computer equipment in a slasher flick, unlike the brand exposure in a cheesy date-night favourite or super-hero blockbuster.

But Lea Dunn, a marketing professor at the Michael G. Foster School of Business at the University of Washington and a long-time fan of the scary-movie genre, has an interesting new theory on the marketing potential of fear-based entertainment.

Her study — The Impact of Fear on Emotional Brand Attachment, published in the Journal of Consumer Research in June — promises to slaughter the status quo and rip open a whole new discussion around consumer behaviour and brand loyalty.

“Our study shows advertisers should consider offering up their brands as something to cling to in the dark when the knives come out and the blood starts to splatter,” she says.

Here’s what Dunn did:

Last year, while still a grad student at the University of British Columbia, she set out to challenge the long-held belief that scary movies don’t sell products.

That’s not to say fear hasn’t been employed to great effect in certain campaigns – the perils of drinking and driving, for instance, or the cancer risks associated with smoking.

Beyond that, though, horror was something messaging experts have shied away from.

The website brandcameo.com tracks product placement in movies. It found that the gruesome Saw franchise, which includes seven movies and two video games, while hugely popular at the box office, had a total of only four identifiable brands associated with it. In the final installment, Saw 3D, the crew went to great pains to remove any identifiable brands, including computers, cars and televisions, from the final cut, according to the website.

By comparison, films aimed at the same youthful market, including Kick Ass and Iron Man 2, feature more than 106 products between them.
Transformers, meanwhile, features more than 50 product placements – the most unique brands placed in a single movie.

Dunn launched a series of experiments where hundreds of subjects were asked to watch video clips selected to illicit a range of emotions: happiness (Friends), excitement (Mr and Mrs Smith/Knight and Day), sadness (The Champ/I am Sam) and fear (The Ring and Salem’s Lot).
The subjects were left alone during the screening of the clips, each with only a little-known Seattle sparkling water and a bag of chips to keep them company.

The no-name element to the experiment is important as savvy marketers already know that the more time an audience has with a particular brand fuels a deeper emotional attachment to it.

Dunn wanted to see if fear could jumpstart that relationship.She determined that it can.

According to her research, fear was the only emotion that consistently scored the highest on a marketing scale measuring emotional attachment to a particular brand.

Everyone who watched the scary movies reported feeling a shared experience with the brand in their hands – a kind of kinship forged in the absence of human connection.

Sadness, excitement and happiness all finished well down on the lower end of the same scale.

“People cope with fear by bonding with other people. When watching a scary movie they look at each other and say ‘Oh my god!’ and their connection is enhanced,” says Dunn.

“But, in the absence of friends, our study shows consumers will create heightened emotional attachment with a brand that happens to be on hand.”

A further study revealed that fear stimulates consumers to report greater brand attachment, even if they are limited to just seeing the product. (It’s worth noting that the enhanced feelings toward the brand were only generated if it was experienced at the same time as fear. If the product is presented afterward, no bond is created.)

Dunn is delighted.

She’d like to see marketers rethink their worries about negative associations with horror films or even gory video games. Dunn suggests advertisers stretch their imaginations to find marketing strategies that best match a particular product or budget.

That could include handing out your candy or soda to patrons at the start of the film. Or take a tip from Doritos. The company has rung up huge sales with a subtle marketing campaign that features its logo hidden within the ultra-creepy video game, Hotel 626.

Whatever you do, don’t be afraid of fear, Dunn said. “Get creative with it.”