THE ROLE OF HUMOR AND

FEAR IN ADVERTISING

PRESENTED BY
U S M A N Z A FA R
MISBAH MUHAMMAD
AASHIR ASIF
INTRODUCTION

• As the economies globalized, world markets dominated by oligopolistic entities

• Product differentiation among firms became important.

• Degree of rivalry increased tremendously.

• Thus, advertising became very important to create brand loyalty and to acquire new customers.

• Creating good advertising message is very important segment in the promotion of a company.

• Companies use different advertising appeals to encourage consumers to buy products and services.

• Humor and Fear are one of those advertising appeals.

HUMOR IN ADVERTISEMENTS

What is Humor?
• The tendency of experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement

• In advertising, humor is the most frequently used emotional appeal

• The advertisement is an important tool for the positioning and promotion

• Many promotional offerings, especially TV ads, are evaluated and printed on humorous advertisements

• Advertising is the center for more attraction and a strong communication force

• Humor is more effective when the participation is rather low than high in influencing the public attitudes to both
advertising and brands

• Compared to non-humorous advertising, humorous advertisements are often stronger

• The ads communicate the information via TV, print, radio, outdoor, social media, and other media
HUMOR IN ADVERTISEMENTS

• Humor expressed both visually and verbally

• The practitioners of advertising claim that humor ads draw greater attention than non-humor

• Humorous publicity shows an interesting position, retains the message, and shows a positive
attitude towards the products

• People attract more to funny ads and give the product a positive feeling

• Humor publicities can travel quickly on circles and working settings of friends and families
CONCEPTUAL MODEL

Product Target
Humor Appeal
Involvement Audience

Medium of Resulting
Communication Impact
FOR EXAMPLE
FEAR IN ADVERTISEMENTS
• A fear appeal is a persuasive communication attempting to arouse fear, promoting precautionary
motivation and self-protective action.

• Fear appeals motivate changes in attitude, purpose, and behavior particularly appeals to fear and
high performance.

• A call for fear is a convincing communication that seeks to ignite fear, encourage caution, and self-
protection.

• Fear experiments indicate that fear can be induced to alter behavior, given the right conditions.

• Furthermore, then acceptance of messages, the perceived danger, and fear may lead to protective
reactions like a psychological reaction without an adequate sense of reaction and self-efficacy.

• In tobacco prevention campaigns, fear-appeal messages are widely used and generally shown to be
effective, whereas the utility of humor appeals is less clear.
FEAR IN ADVERTISEMENTS
• The complexities of social and not-for-profit marketing were met with excitement by marketing
researchers and practitioners, and governments and other organizations are embraced and even planned
to take marketing measures to try and discourage people from damaging comfortability such as drink-
driving, smoking and drug abuse.

• Fear appeals are frequently used in anti-smoking advertising.

• The evidence on the effectiveness of fear appeals is mixed and in some studies strong fear appeals have
been found to reinforce the undesirable behavior.

• Individual self-efficacy may play a role in moderating the effects of fear appeals.

• In advertising contexts where the intention was to encourage socially desirable behaviors it has been
shown that greater self-efficacy is associated with a more positive response to fear appeals.
FOR EXAMPLE
CONCLUSION
• People like humor and enjoy funny ads and they buy items mostly based on funny commercials.

• Humor is attractive and influences the purchase decision of consumers.

• The humor and quality of goods are preferable to irrelevant humor.

• Humor with existing and renowned products is more successful than new ones.

• Humor is best suited for products and sensational products with low involvement.

• However, humor is a sword on two sides, it may cause dissatisfaction and harm to consumers if not
appropriate or if aggressive and offensive.

• Humor increases affection and intensity than advertising without humor.

 CONCLUSION
• Whereas, fear appeal is a perception of an individual and has an impact on the understood ethics of
fear-based advertising.

• People who believe they can stop smoking if they choose to (high self-efficacy) are more likely to
see fear appeals as acceptable in anti-smoking advertising.

• While it cannot be established that self-efficacy has a direct impact on advertising attitudes and on
the intention to change behavior, research has shown that self-efficacy has an indirect and positive
impact on advertising attitudes and on an intention to change behavior.

• In the context of discouraging harmful behavior, the effect of self-efficacy on advertising is indirect
through a sense of the ad 's ethics.
CONCLUSION
• The advertisers have to take into account the self-efficiency of the target audience in designing a
campaign using fear appeal advertisements to discourage undesirable behavior.

• The present the study was based on anti-tobacco but also relevant for other important health
contexts, such as campaigns aimed at reducing the consumption of unhealthy foods, such as salt,
sugar and fat food, and campaigns to reduce alcohol consumption and associated unwanted
behaviors, such as drink-driving.
THANK YOU