In this op-ed, Leif Stromnes, managing director of strategy and growth at DDB Australia, delves into arguably the most powerful tenet of marketing, which is emotions, by using two opposing and prevalent US political figures. Dig in.
Barack Obama’s 2008 “Yes We Can” presidential campaign is widely regarded as a masterstroke and one of the most powerful political movements of all time. Against seemingly impossible odds, Obama prevailed against John McCain with a message of hope for the American people.
Hope is the cornerstone of the liberal movement in America, as the Democratic grand narrative bears out.
“Once upon a time, the vast majority of people suffered in societies that were unjust, unhealthy and oppressive.
But the noble human aspiration for autonomy, equality and prosperity struggled mightily against the forces of misery and oppression.
This struggle for a good society in which individuals are equal and free to pursue happiness is the one mission truly worth dedicating one’s life to achieving”.
This is in stark contrast to the “Make America Great Again” platform that Donald Trump campaigned on in 2016 and again in 2024. This was also considered a political masterstroke, and like Obama, Trump was a massive underdog who prevailed over Hilary Clinton against seemingly impossible odds.
The Trump campaign was once again straight out of the conservative playbook as the Republican grand narrative bears out.
“Once upon a time, America was a shining beacon.
Then liberals came along. They subverted our traditional American values and opposed God and faith at every step of the way.
Then Americans decided to take their country back from those who would undermine it”.
Both campaigns were about change, but the persuasion strategy could hardly have seemed more different.
Obama offered hope for all Americans, regardless of race, colour or creed, while Trump stoked fears about murderous illegal immigrants who were causing a crime wave across America and eating citizens’ dogs and cats.
We have long known that information alone is a weak driver of behaviour change because people do not consider facts in an impartial and unbiased fashion. The emotional framing and personal context for information is the critical difference between acknowledgement or dismissal, and action or indifference.
Hope and fear are two of the most powerful emotional levers for behaviour change, but they work in slightly different ways.
Let’s first consider fear.
Fear creates urgency and steals attention because people perceive themselves to be faced with imminent harm. Psychologists have long known that humans often need an uncomfortable “heat event” to stress them into immediate and effective action.
Behavioural economists and marketers have also long understood the galvanising power of fear.
Nothing illustrates this better than the brilliant marketing of safety capsules and baby seats in cars. The data shows that these seats are at best, nominally helpful. It is certainly safer to keep a child in the rear seat than sitting on a lap in the front seat, where in the event of an accident he or she essentially becomes a projectile. But the safety here is to be gained from preventing the kids from riding shotgun, not from strapping them into a $500 car seat. Nevertheless, many parents are so primed by feelings of fear for what might happen to their children in the event of a car crash that they buy the seat and trek to the local police station to have it installed just right. In 2005 in the USA alone, more than five million of these car seats were sold and installed.
The strategy of fear has also been successfully applied to child-resistant packaging, flame-retardant pyjamas, keeping children away from airbags in cars and safety drawstrings on children’s clothes.
These are all important and noble initiatives, but when one considers that 400 children’s lives are lost to backyard swimming pool drownings each year in the US versus choking on packaging (50 lives lost), pyjamas catching fire (10 lives lost), airbags (fewer than five kids a year have been killed by airbags since their introduction) and safety drawstrings on children’s clothing (two lives lost), it demonstrates just how powerful fear is as an emotional primer and behaviour change strategy.
Hope works in a slightly different way. If fear galvanises the need to protect oneself from harm, hope tends to give people agency, inviting them to envision themselves as part of the solution to the change they seek.
One of the success stories of a hope-based narrative is renewable energy. Stories of innovation, resilience and progress have driven a groundswell of support for wind and solar power. When individuals see a pathway to impact, whether by adopting sustainable practices, voting for climate-friendly policies, or joining collective action, they’re more likely to engage and sustain that engagement over time.
Climate change communication is another example where hope greatly outperforms fear-based messages. Whilst fear can momentarily shock people into awareness, it often triggers defensive responses like denial, apathy or a sense of helplessness. A 2021 study in Nature Climate Change found that messages framing climate change as an insurmountable crisis led to feelings of fatalism, reducing the likelihood of new behaviours.
Despite the supposed differences in how fear and hope work to change behaviour, there are actually more similarities between the two than first meets the eye.
They are both motivators, one towards something and one away from something.
They are both felt when an event has either positive or negative outcomes that are impactful, and, or meaningful to the individual.
And they both cause anticipatory physiological responses which are uncannily similar – sweaty palms, and excitement or trepidation.
In an evolutionary sense, it may also be impossible to separate them. If one considers the instinct to survive, is it hope that drives us to keep on going when all is lost? Or is it the fear of dying? If one is pulling and the other pushing, clearly double the force is created to overcome the inertia and keep us fighting through adversity.
For all of us working in the fields of marketing and persuasive communications, perhaps the simplest way to frame the main differences for successful behaviour change is that hope needs a big goal and fear needs a resolution.
This is a neat solution because, in the absence of a big goal, hope can sometimes lead to complacency, leading people to ease off from making the required sacrifices, political choices or lifestyle changes for something as profound as climate change, for example.
In the absence of a resolution to the fear, the tendency is for the subject to dismiss the threat as not relevant to them.
Both the “Yes We Can” and “Make America Great Again” campaigns seem to satisfy this definition.
Obama began his first presidential term with one of the most famous speeches and calls to arms of all time, and Trump’s first 100 days in power have been all about resolution, including plans to deport illegal immigrants from America.
It seems both leaders are students, and effective proponents, of the power of hope and fear to change human behaviour.
