A Review on Fear Appeals in Social Marketing: Setting Future Research Agenda

Abstract

In marketing as well as in social marketing communication, fear appeals have been used as persuasive tools to influence behavior change and have extensively been used for various behavioral change programs. A comprehensive literature review was conducted related to fear appeals in the domain of social marketing from scientific journals of repute. Such type of systematic literature review on fear appeals in social marketing has not been extensively conducted to set future research to set agenda for bringing sustained behavior changes. Although fear appeals have influenced behavior changes, they were not being proved effective for a longer period. The group centered approaches using the group as a unit of analysis has shown better results as compared to one-way communication based on emotional fear appeals. This research paper sets an agenda for future research using group centered and participatory paradigm to make fear appeals more effective in the long run.