How is using fear any less ethical than any of the others emotional states we try to induce? How about greed? Or lust? Pride, hunger, thirst, or any other human desire?

What’s unethical about it? You’re writing ad copy or making a video. If they don’t want to continue reading or watching, they can put it down. You’re not putting a gun to their heads.

Your copy isn’t so powerful that they’re going to buy no matter what their foundational beliefs are. You’re not forcing them to do something against their will.

No matter how good you are, you aren’t going to have some kind of magical power over their minds that they haven’t already agreed to.

(When people read copy and are persuaded by it, THEY have done the persuading, not you. They just used your ad as the platform for that persuasion. You really didn’t do anything but put an offer in front of them. They tempted themselves in the final analysis.)

Touching their emotions is your job. If you can’t tap into an emotional state, you may as well go serve tables at a restaurant or go dig ditches. And fear is a legitimate emotion that we should be reaching out to. Why wouldn’t it be? There are fearful things in this life that certain products help defeat and nullify.

And the primary motivator for these areas of life happen to be fear. How else would Broadview sell alarm systems…through greed or pride?

Fear is the motivator with items like alarm systems, firearms, gold coins, conspiracy books, health products, life insurance, and anything else that promises a solution to a fearful situation.

Here’s one example of using fear (of a strong variety for a certain demographic) to sell a continuity product…

Let’s say you’re trying to sell posters. What can you possibly say about a poster? And what if you have several different posters on your website? Not much to say, is there?

You can’t simply say each poster is the best one. That’s not really that emotional, any way. That’s just empty bluster and won’t get you anywhere. Emotional selling of posters has more to do with touching your customer’s connection to the person on the poster. What is it about the singer they like? Why does a certain movie excite them?

You first have to describe the subject of the poster, and not the poster itself. No one wants to buy a piece of rolled up paper. What they’re buying is some kind of fantasy connection with the singer, actor, or movie. Use evocative language…describe the scene the poster represents…put your reader in that scene. Make it come alive with action.

And then give them a way to capture a moment frozen in time with that singer or actor…all they have to do is buy that poster and they can feel that special connection with their favorite star.

Your goal is to reach into your customer’s mind and connect him with your product.

Another thing you can do is to somehow emotionally describe the physical product itself. Seems impossible…how can someone use emotion to sell the physical features of anything? No one is going to feel a chill go down their back because of the high gloss of the poster paper…the crisp colors made possible by some exotic printing process…the rich depth seen in the image itself…or the playful way the dolphins in the poster swim through the ocean’s warmth. (Okay…that last one was more about the content of the poster than the ordinary physical facts about the poster.)  Nah…you couldn’t really emotionally touch anyone with something so ordinary as the physical features of your product or how it was made. Or could you?

See, the emotional touch isn’t about writing a romance novel or making them cry. It’s about using words that put the product in their hands and in front of their eyes, even though they’re sitting in front of the computer in their underwear and needing that first cup of coffee.

It’s about reaching into them and pulling on their inmost desires related to that product. It’s painting a rich, smooth picture for them using more lively words and sentence structure than just a boring list of bland features. And by doing so, you can even make a mundane feature come to life right in front of their very eyes. Ricardo Montalban did just this by describing a certain car’s upholstery in terms of “soft, Corinthian leather”.

With emotion laden copy, you can take even lifeless feature lists and make them compelling, living micro-stories that move your reader to actually want what they’re reading about.