The Study of Using "Fear and Worry Appeals" in Advertising from the Islamic Perspective

To increase advertising effectiveness, various techniques are used. One is the fear appeal which is mostly practiced in social and marketing advertising. This appeal by portraying the negative consequences of doing or quitting a behavior, leads to arousing interest in the person and directing him to the desired behavior. One of the business objectives for which fear appeal could be applicable is confidence in the future. In other words, by creating fear and worry about providing future needs, the advertising encourages the audience to buy the product that is claimed it could reduce the level of their concern. In the present article, we try to analyze the content of a TV commercial about an investment account which arouses concern about future. The level of this concern, however, is found to be not high enough. Based on these findings, some Islamic inhibiting principles and strategies for generating advertising messages that use fear appeal are presented. Three derived principles are: 1) the ban on creating fear and worry about future costs, 2) the prohibition of associating a product with concepts such as a guarantee for future success, treasure and real wealth for the future, 3) the ban on showing that future needs are definitely provided if the advertised product is purchased.