Jeff Butts’ Most Important and Interesting Stories of 2022 – TMO Daily Observations 2022-12-26
TMO Managing Editor Jeff Butts kicks off our week reviewing 2022. His most important story is a life saver, while an iPhone feature has a lock on most interesting.
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Ken and Jeff:
It’s not a question of ‘selling fear’, but leveraging uncertainty as part of the value proposition in marketing a product. It’s what insurance companies do. The prospective buyer then has to perform their own risk/benefit analysis to determine whether or not that value proposition leads them to a ‘buy’ for that product. If the risk is too low, as in ‘I never engage in that activity’ or the benefit is unfavourable, as in ‘that doesn’t sufficiently help me’ or ‘the entry level price is too high for what’s on offer’, then the value proposition is a miss, or it was simply poor marketing.
Selling fear is, ‘There’s a thing that’s coming for you. You cannot run. You cannot hide. It will get you. Our product (or I alone) can save you.’ It’s what many in the antivaxxer community have accused the professional public health community of engaging in around the use of vaccines. The difference is, communicable diseases are real. So too is immunological naivety; the inevitable collision of the two resulting in millions of preventable deaths/year from vaccine-preventable diseases. So, that too does not qualify as ‘selling fear’ but attempting to inform decision-making in the face of life-saving options.
Rather, the political arena is a theatre in which ‘selling fear’ is practically de rigueur for many of today’s most ambitious politicians.