An Uncertain World and Fearful Consumers: What it Means for Brands

In my recent blog post on Psychology Today, I commented on a Washington Post article reporting that teens can hack and otherwise get around parental controls on phones. I said I was surprised that anyone was surprised. While there are clearly lessons for parents in this, there are also some implications for brands. 

A quick search on parental controls showed me an avalanche of information, recommendations, dire warnings and sales pitches about the need to control and keep kids safe–but nary a story on teaching kids to use technology well and develop critical thinking. This tells me that parents are generally stymied (terrified) by the digital landscape and are looking for a way to make their kids–and the world–safe. I don’t blame them. I’d like it if an app could do that for me, too.

However, there is an important message here for brands–and not just the ones that sell security software. People are afraid.

You can see the fear in the sheer numbers of parental control apps, for sure, but you can see it across society. Fear creates distrust. The parental control apps bonanza tells me that brands need to be aware of the general level of digital suspicion. Trust has been undermined in many quarters, especially information flows. We don’t know what’s “real” information coming from anyone. What’s marketing but the transfer of information?

Emotions have a halo-effect, impacting things around them. Brands need to be aware of how the anxiety about people and technology across society will trickle down on them. Emotions frame their communications — in this case, increased suspicion of digital communications (e.g. advertising) and greater sensitivity to manipulation.

How Fear Messes with Our Thinking

The cognitive impact of fear is significant. When people are afraid, their emotions impact how they think in a number of ways that impact attention and perceptions of relevance and meaning:

• Fear makes people look for ways to feel safer (e.g. the success of superhero movies and politicians who promise they can protect them). This is a cognitive bias called the certainty effect or, from a slightly different theoretical vantage point, the avoidance of cognitive dissonance. This changes content preferences.
• Fear makes people attracted to things, ideas and information that reinforce their worldview. This is the cognitive bias called the confirmation bias or seeking cognitive consonance. Confirmation of one’s beliefs literally feels good and reduces the motivation to investigate further. This changes what information attracts people. From an instinctive or neural perspective, what content triggers “approach.”
• Fear makes people hypersensitive to being cast as victims. They are more suspicious of ads trying to “sell” them because they feel vulnerable in general. Not surprisingly, the changes what information repels people. In contrast to approach, there is an instinctive or neural response to “avoid.”

The Implications of a Fearful Audience for Marketers

You might think that all this general anxiety doesn’t have much to do with you, but it does. No matter what you sell, from shoes and chocolate to raising money for a worthy cause. The implications of a fearful audience for marketers are:

• It elevates the impact of Influencers (“regular people”) because they feel more honest. This, of course, has implications for Influencers who carefully guard and maintain the trust they have built with their audience.
• It adds more weight to word-of-mouth and reviews and decreases the believability of the company itself.
• It argues in favor of ads that don’t look like ads–stories and emotional experiences such as the Subaru #MAKEADOGSDAY campaign or Airbnb’s vignettes of travellers engage consumers and trigger feelings of belonging.
• It means positive emotion, which already is more powerful than negative, will be even stickier. If people are already afraid, scaring them more doesn’t have any value-add (and it’s a reprehensible approach, anyway). Humor, connection and empowerment help offset the general anxiety and vulnerability and make a message memorable.

This is also an opportunity for brands to actively try and make things better. By monitoring consumer narratives, brands can take a litmus test of their customer’s emotions and work to shift the emotional baseline toward the positive through content and engagement. Making people laugh or activating a sense of altruism won’t save the world, but positive emotions can increase optimism, resilience and creativity.

The Power of Positive

Positive media content has already been shown to get more shares than negative content. Seeing positive content also influences people to express or share more positive content themselves. From a network perspective, positive nodes attract more connections and the connections are stickier. No one likes hanging out with a downer node.

So if you want to attract more followers and have them hang around longer, make positive media an active strategy underlying your campaigns.