There is no greater emotion to ping in your prospects than that of fear if you want to increase your sales. People buy because of fear. People fear death. They fear getting old. They fear going broke. They fear missing out.

Fear comes in many forms and is the most powerful motivator causing people to buy. Always try to work fear into your marketing literature.

OnStar used fear to make billions. Their best pulling ad was an actual recorded call of a little girl saying, “We just had an accident and my Mom isn’t moving, please help!” This planted the idea in peoples minds that what if that happened to me when I was driving? What would my daughter do if we did not have OnStar?

Perhaps the most famous use of fear in advertising ever was Tony Schwartz’s legendary ‘Daisy Ad’ for the Johnson campaign. Schwartz suffered from agoraphobia, an abnormal fear of open or public places, and so he understood the controlling power of fear very well.

The ad was broadcast on Sept. 7, 1964, during NBC’s “Monday Night at the Movies.” It showed a little girl in a meadow (in reality a Manhattan park), counting aloud as she plucks the petals from a daisy. Her voice dissolves into a man’s voice counting downward, followed by the image of an atomic blast. President Johnson’s voice is heard on the soundtrack:

“These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.”

The tragedy that results in market cycles, like this recession, can be used to make money. I wrote a sales letter for a property management company that advertised their single family home services with the headline, “Afraid Of Losing Your Home To Foreclosure?”