Threatening message for smokers

Fear is the key to a successful anti-smoking campaign.

That's according to research at the University of Adelaide, which shows the use of threatening messages in advertising to be more persuasive when the advertisements do elicit fear.

For his Honours degree in Commerce, undertaken under the supervision of Professor of Marketing Pascale Quester, Damien Arthur investigated the effectiveness of threatening messages in advertising by conducting an experiment on 293 students.

He presented them with different types of anti-smoking advertisements and gauged their responses, with the findings of the study appearing in the September edition of the international journal Psychology and Marketing.

These findings suggest that it is necessary to arouse the emotion of fear for a threatening message to be most effective.

"It was thought that an individual's response to a threatening message was extremely rational," Mr Arthur said.

"Take the example of smoking. Previous research suggests that an individual would appraise the severity of the threat - such as irreversible blindness, - the likelihood of this occurring to them, the likelihood that quitting smoking would reduce this threat, and whether they believed they could quit.

"This is a very rational view of the decision making process. My findings indicate that each of these components can be present, but the greater the amount of fear that is aroused, the more effective an anti-smoking advertisement will be."

The results also suggest that as fear is an emotional response to a threatening message, it will dissipate rapidly over time; the consequences being that the greater time between seeing such an advertisement and the desire for a cigarette, the less likely the advertisement will affect behaviour.

"For anti-smoking ads to work well, they need to be immediate," he said. "It's one thing to see a graphic advertisement in print or on TV, but if the urge to smoke is not there, then the impact of the ad can be wasted."

"To be more effective, anti-smoking advertisements should be placed in environments where people are most likely to desire a cigarette: in entertainment venues, especially pubs, or best of all on the pack itself.

"This is when the urge to smoke is at its highest, and when the graphic, fear-based advertising is most likely to be effective."

Story by Ben Osborne