We are already talking about new marketing concepts. Have you ever heard of FUD? In fact, it is not a recent marketing and sales strategy, but it is going to be 50 years old soon. It is a concept that I heard about this weekend at a Quondos event in Zaragoza where I had the pleasure of attending a presentation by Ricardo Tayar on conversion.
FUD Photo rights by Fotolia
It is one of those occasions where they tell you things that you have an intuition about, but they put it in such a clear and direct way that you have no doubts and think: “We can’t leave this for later, we have to do it now.” I was impressed, like the rest of the attendees, with the quality of the talk and the way it was conveyed.
Data is a key tool for making decisions, and it doesn’t matter what we think. I’ll stick with the phrase that I’ve also used in this blog in a similar way in different contexts: “Opinions are like assholes, we all have one.” Ricardo presented the concept of FUD to analyze the content that we present to a user who visits our website for the first time.
FUD is an acronym for fear , uncertainty and doubt . It was first mentioned in 1920, but it was not until 1975 that it was referenced in a marketing book. It was large companies such as IBM and Microsoft that made FUD famous by applying it very successfully as a commercial strategy.
But let’s take it step by step. “ Fear , uncertainty and doubt” means “fear, uncertainty and doubts” so in Spanish we could use the acronym. MID although I doubt that it is usually used in our lands to refer to this concept. It serves to create fear scenarios in case of using competing products . The commercial message that you are sending to your audience is “be careful, if you use this or that product (which is not ours) because you could suffer these consequences…”. Negative attributes are assigned to competing products to make the offer itself more attractive. These would be some practical cases:
If you offer a hosting service
you would show that your servers perform better than the rest of the market. So by using another offer one always runs a greater risk of data loss.
If you offer a food product, you would say that the competition offers less healthy food. Which raises doubts about whether you gain more weight by eating A than B.
Creating suspicions about whether a competitor uses child labour in distant countries to reduce its production costs. This is intended to create uncertainty about supporting a company that may not have the same ethical code as us.
It is also used a lot in politics. I don’t know if you have noticed the FUD that the PP is using against. Podemos and they are using the same strategy to provoke a change against the current government.
How to use FUD without messing with the competition
Personally, I don’t like to mess with anyone by doing some kind of anti-marketing campaign. I prefer that the user decide if the competition is better than me. But I certainly won’t say anything negative about the competition with the aim of wanting to look better. In fact, Ricardo presented FUD to us in this way at the Q500 in Zaragoza.