History of Fear Appeal

It was difficult searching for the origins or founders of Fear Appeal Theory. After vigorous research I found an article written in 1974 that briefly highlights the studies and experiments utilizing fear appeal data as far back as 1953. Before then, it seems that it was common knowledge that fear was a form of marketing persuasion however there were no studies to back that opinion.

Sternthal, B., & Craig, C. S. (1974). Fear Appeals: Revisited and Revised. Journal of Consumer Research, 1(3), 22–34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2488776

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Prototype Final

Link to Colin’s Final Prototype on Construct 3: https://www.construct.net/en/free-online-games/colin-hanrahans-final-42528/play ______________________________________________________ Here is the link to my final Prototype in Construct 3. It was very informative and exciting to research Media Dependency Theory as a Framework to prove the thesis in how women above the age of 30 have increased mental stress when watching cable news due to its fear-inducing segments.

Fear Appeal Definitions

Below I compiled all of my sources and made a list of quotes defining the purposes and uses for 'Fear Appeal'. My intentions are to list out all of my findings and compile them into my narrative for the first segment Fear Appeal Definitions: 1- “Fear Appeal persuades people to feel that they are assuming a risk if they do or do not purchase a certain product. The idea is that if consumers don’t use the product you are advertising, you make them feel like there may be undesirable consequences as a result.”(Newbold, 2017) 2- “They found fear appeals to be effective, especially when they contained recommendations for one-time only (versus repeated) behaviors and if the targeted audience included a larger percentage of women. They also confirmed prior findings that fear appeals are effective when they describe how to avoid the threat (e.g., get the vaccine, use a condom).” (Tannenbaul et al., 2015) 3- "According to fear appeal theories, a fear appeal is defined as a message th...

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