By Brandi Buzzard on August 19, 2024
How Fear-Based Marketing Manipulates Our Food Choices: What You Need to Know
Don’t Set a Plate for Fear at the Table
I’m an ’80s baby. Meaning I grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons and digging through brightly colored cereal searching for the toy at the bottom of the box. Smashed between memories of Tweety Bird and Trix, is the mantra, “This is your brain on drugs” voiced over a sizzling egg in a cast iron pan. We can all agree on two things: 1) That marketing campaign was nothing if not memorable and, 2) Fear is impactful. Yes, I said fear.
At its core, “This is Your Brain on Drugs” was a fear-based marketing campaign. Admittedly, the point of the campaign was to end or dissuade bad behaviors or habits but nonetheless, fear was still the foundation.
Conversely, the same foundation can be used to promote a good behavior, such as in the marketing campaign for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s “Click It. Don’t Risk It.” Using fear – a car accident and possible death – to encourage a good behavior – wearing a seatbelt – is what many would deem a good way to use the emotion.
Fear works, plain and simple. It’s one of our most basic emotions – a la “fight or flight” – and dates back to prehistoric times when cave people had to determine if they were going to stay and fight the saber-toothed tiger or run away and live to fight another day.
Folks, food companies know fear works – and they’ve been using it to influence our food choices, and impact their bottom lines, for decades. Think about it, how many times have you seen a commercial for Chipotle and heard the chain promote its food by indicating that other fast-casual restaurants serve unhealthy or unsafe food? I am not a big fan of boycotting companies that make business decisions I disagree with – if we do that in food and agriculture, we’ll eventually have nowhere to shop or eat! However, I break that personal rule for Chipotle, a company which has egregiously stomped on conventional and modern agriculture for so long, I will never be able to patron the chain … but I digress.
Fear-based marketing is also visible on jugs of orange juice labeled GMO-free. However, to the surprise of many, there are no GMO oranges in existence. ALL orange juice is naturally GMO-free, but by placing a GMO-free label on the carton, the company is hoping to persuade you to buy their product by convincing you GMOs are bad and GMO-free is good, which couldn’t be further from the truth. For future reference, here is a list of all the GMOs in our food supply today and it is updated consistently. Spoiler alert: GMOs are safe.
I could go on but hopefully, the idea has been grasped sufficiently.
The latest group to adopt the fear-based marketing method? Sadly, it’s farmers and ranchers. And while fear-driven ag marketers aren’t buying million-dollar ad spots during the Super Bowl, their tactics show up on social media and at farmers markets daily. For example, I’m sure you’ve seen images floating around of two packages of ground beef – one brown and one bright red – and the caption seeks to scare consumers away from grocery store beef and patron the local beef producer for ground beef and steak. Such marketing seeks to convince people that grocery stores are using nefarious methods to sell meat, thus the brown color. When, in reality, meat color is influenced by several factors such as oxygen exposure, packaging, oxidation, lean percentage and animal age, not the meat market manager “pumping food full of chemicals” (I put that in quotations so you, my dear readers, would know it’s not true). My personal belief is marketing of this nature – stomping on one farmer to sell one’s own farm products – is sleazy and lazy, but you can decide for yourself.
Photo courtesy of Janeal Yancey, Mom at the Meat Counter.
When it comes down to the brass tacks, fear-based marketing exists for profitability in the food industry and since food is more than just nourishment – it’s emotional, nostalgic, economically driven, etc. – it can be easy to get sucked in to marketing claims, as we strive to make the very best decisions for our family.
No one can be faulted for wanting to provide their family with the safest and healthiest food possible, but I hope the anxiety of choosing the “right” food can be lessened after reading this piece. Don’t get mired down in the labels, don’t let fear drive your food decisions and as always, please feel free to contact me with any questions you might have about food, farming or ranching at bbuzzard13@gmail.com.
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