#52 Doom Marketing: Why Negative Emotions Don’t Sell
You’ve heard of doom scrolling, now add capitalism to that. In this newsletter we unpack what doom marketing is and why it won’t work in the long term.
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Evoking a strong emotional response is the hallmark of any successful marketing campaign. When users feel an emotional connection to your product, they are likely to spend more. But how ethical is it to evoke emotions like anxiety to sell your product?
Doom marketing is when companies try to create a sense of panic or fear in order to sell you something. During pandemic times, when doom scrolling was at its peak and all we saw was bad news, marketers tried to set their products apart by being the good news. Many feel-good ads like Nike’s You Can’t Stop Us campaign were going viral. Now that things have returned to almost-normal, and people are back to their routine of scrolling while not really paying attention to the content, marketers have found a new way to stand out.
Leveraging human emotions is an important aspect of marketing, and this one taps into human psychology to use our negativity bias: the tendency for humans to focus more on negative experiences and information than positive ones. Creating a sense of urgency is a common marketing tactic, with multiple listicles available online on how to use the right language to get the customer to act immediately.
However, deliberately using language that creates a sense of fear is not the same as creating urgency. For example, there are multiple ways to write the copy for a post aimed at getting people to apply for a course that can help them upskill in their careers.
These sentences evoke two very different emotions. The first one is hopeful, the second one is doom-y.
Usually, medical products use this strategy, telling you to use their product or risk illness or even death. We also commonly see this tactic by organisations seeking funds or in government awareness campaigns about stopping tobacco use or wearing a seatbelt.
Doom marketing might work in matters of life and death, but its ethics are questioned when it comes to selling products that aren’t a necessity to live. Anxiety disrupts rational thinking and highlighting worst-case scenarios can push someone towards a purchase they might regret later.
Copywriters and content writers need to be especially aware when crafting campaigns or even posts because while such tactics definitely succeed in grabbing attention, over time consumers become wary of messaging that constantly pushes negative emotions and eventually lose trust in the brand.
Some might argue that extreme tactics like this are required to stand out as everyone's attention span is already saturated, however, this leads to the bigger question of the ethics of marketing as a whole and their responsibility to their consumers.
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