Misplaced marketing commentary: social marketing and myths of appeals to fear

Starting in 1989, Australia's Traffic Accident Commission undertook an intensive advertising campaign to encourage safe driving practices, featuring very strong appeals to audience fears and showing deadly outcomes from driving at excessive speeds, driving drunk or failing to wear seat belts. Following the campaign's apparent success in reducing the nation's toll of . highway fatalities, the New Zealand Land TransportSafety Authority started a similar advertising effort in 1995. Unfortunately, despite government claims to the contrary, the New Zea!~nd effort has not been as successful, with at least one academic study nofing that any link between the campaign and the road toll is tenuous at best (Macpherson and Lewis, 1998). The government people might like to presume that they have done the job if more people are "thinking" about safety, but since money for improving traffic conditions and road fatalities is finite, advertising spending logically reduces funding for other activities such as enforcement. The goal is not drivers thinking about safety, but rather, getting them to actually change unsafe behaviors. Unfortunately, any advertising researchers who believe the often repeated statements in textbooks and academic journals will also conclude that the New Zealand advertising messages were too strong and gory, not hitting on the audience's "optimalleve1 of fear" for persuasion. Actually, there are two problems of misplaced marketing. First, while advertising might "seem like" a good idea, not every commercial effort has the desired effect. Most public information or. social marketing efforts fail because no one first tried to understand the audience. And second, the