Social isolation, being a bad mother, losing your job, looking ugly, losing friends, contributing to global warming: who is not afraid of these things? But some of the most terrifying problems we live with today are germs, viruses and bacteria. Marketers and advertisers use and create panic and anxiety in many different ways to persuade us to buy something or to do a certain thing to protect us and our fellow humans from germs. Their strategies and elements of argumentation are incredible and sometimes unbelievable, but they work.
Ads like the following one (which was released in 2009 by the German government together with the Robert-Koch- Institut) were designed to “peddle panic and paranoia”, like Lindstrom describes it in his book `Brandwashed`.
(Erreger verbreiten sich schneller, als man denkt. = Germs spread faster than you think.)
(Händewaschen schützt. = Washing hands protects.)
(Händewaschen schützt. = Washing hands protects.)
The first thing that came to my mind when I saw this ad: Now I´m going to wash my hands a minimum of fifteen times a day! Congratulations to the creators of the video, they did their job well and reached their goal, they raised fear in me!
I believe that there are many people in this world who are afraid of getting sick and picking up viruses of any kind. Just by touching "everyday- things", pushing a button in the elevator, grabbing a pole in the bus, or using a dollar note (which are all things that were probably touched by millions of people before) we can get infected. And not only careless children or old people with a weak immune system are affected. Office workers, teenagers, parents, and all the others who are not living in quarantine at home, so basically everybody, is exposed to the small living things who make us sick. But there is one simple trick to avoid all this: wash your hands.
1) Turn on the water!
2) Get some soap!
3) Rub your hands for a couple of seconds!
4) Wash the soap off your hands and dry them!
5) Don´t forget to turn off the water (because everybody is afraid of climate Change, too)!
Sounds easy, doesn´t it? We actually don´t need to buy hand sanitizer or other expensive cleaning products; it´s all about soap and water. And to put something at the top of the iceberg: we are not only responsible for ourselves, but also for all the other people we have contact with, as the video shows properly. “Fear with a high level of blame, regret, guilt, or even a dare tends to translate emotion into action. (from an article in the Journal of Consumer Research from 2006 and cited in Lindstrom´s book). We watch the ad and immediately think of our friends, coworkers, and family. We don´t want them to get a serious sickness, so what is the outcome? From now on we will wash our hands regularly.
The music used to illustrate the spread of germs intensifies our fear. Edvard Grieg´s Peer Gynt Suite with the song “In the Hall of the Mountain King” makes us anxious and we don´t know what´s coming next and if “something is hiding behind the next corner”.
Ads like this one don´t exist often. The advertisers don´t want us to buy something, but just appeal to our responsibility, and share a piece of information.
“…Identifying the fear…, activating it, amplifying it, and paying on it in ways that hit us at the deepest subconscious level” (Martin Lindstrom, Brandwashed) are the strategies of advertisers and the best way to spread their virus- like campaigns.
