Greetings, Skin microbiome enthusiasts,
There is a reason you have probably stood in front of a pharmacy shelf, picked up a product you did not plan to buy, and put it in your cart anyway. Someone worked very hard to make sure that happened. Not by showing you what the product could do for you, but by making you afraid of what might happen if you did not have it.
That is fear marketing. It has been around for over a century. It is deeply rooted in how the human brain works. And if we are being completely honest with you, which is kind of the whole point of this piece, it is something we at Fafabiotic have had to look at carefully in our own messaging, even when we did not realize we were doing it.
This post is about that full story. The history, the science, the industry pattern, our own reflection, and where we are trying to go instead. Thanks to Claud for making it easy to find resources and putting the post together.
Where Fear Marketing Started: The 1920s Blueprint
Fear-based advertising is not a modern invention. Its roots go back to the early twentieth century, when mass media first gave brands the power to reach millions of people at once.
The most instructive early example is Listerine. Originally developed in the 1870s as a surgical antiseptic, it had modest sales for decades. Then, in the 1920s, its marketers rebranded it as a cure for “chronic halitosis,” a then-obscure medical term for bad breath. The ad campaigns that followed were remarkable in their emotional intensity. They featured forlorn young women and men, eager for marriage but turned away because of their partner’s rotten breath. One famous ad asked plaintively: “Can I be happy with him in spite of that?”
Until that moment, bad breath was not widely considered a social catastrophe. Listerine created the catastrophe and then sold the cure. As advertising scholar James B. Twitchell documented, “Listerine did not make mouthwash as much as it made halitosis.” The company’s revenues climbed from $115,000 to more than $8 million in just seven years. (Source: Wikipedia, “Listerine,” citing James B. Twitchell, “Twenty Ads That Shook the World.”)
This was the blueprint that an entire industry would follow. Identify a fear. Amplify it into a social emergency. Sell the antidote.
The concept of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt as a deliberate business tactic has roots in the same era. The phrase was in use in the 1920s and appeared explicitly in sales and marketing contexts by 1975. Gene Amdahl, founder of Amdahl Corporation, described it that year as the tactic IBM salespeople used to make customers afraid of switching away from IBM products. (Source: Wikipedia, “Fear, uncertainty, and doubt.”)
Mid-Century: When Fear Went Mainstream
By the mid-twentieth century, fear-based persuasion had spread well beyond consumer goods.
The most iconic single example is the “Daisy” advertisement, a television commercial that aired during Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 presidential campaign. It opened with a small girl counting petals off a daisy. As she reached nine, an ominous male voice began a nuclear launch countdown. The screen cut to a nuclear explosion and mushroom cloud. The ad never mentioned his opponent by name. It did not need to. The implied message was clear: one vote meant safety, the other meant nuclear war.
The commercial aired once on network television and then became a national conversation, replayed endlessly in news coverage. It remains one of the most studied examples of fear-based persuasion in history. (Source: Wikipedia, “Fearmongering.”)
In commercial advertising, the same decades saw fear appeals become the default across product categories. Car commercials implied that fewer airbags meant your family would die. Disinfectant ads showed dangerous bacteria lurking on every surface in your kitchen. Insurance products were sold almost entirely through worst-case scenarios. Fear had stopped being a tactic and become an entire creative language.
Why It Works: The Neuroscience Behind It
Fear marketing is not effective because it is clever. It is effective because it exploits documented features of the human brain.
When you encounter a fear-triggering stimulus, your amygdala, the brain’s emotional processing center, activates and triggers a fight-or-flight response. This state prioritizes immediate survival over careful, deliberate thinking. Decisions made from inside a fear response tend to be faster, more impulsive, and less reflective. Marketers who can trigger this state effectively bypass cost-benefit reasoning.
A peer-reviewed fMRI study published in the Journal of Marketing Communications confirmed that fear-based imagery activates multiple brain regions simultaneously, including areas associated with emotional appraisal and memory retrieval, making fear-based messages more likely to be remembered and acted upon than neutral or purely positive messaging. (Source: “Neural correlates of fear appeal in advertising: An fMRI analysis.” Journal of Marketing Communications, Vol. 26, No. 1. doi:10.1080/13527266.2018.1497680)
The second mechanism is loss aversion. Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published Prospect Theory in 1979, demonstrating that losses feel approximately twice as psychologically powerful as equivalent gains. Losing $50 hurts about twice as much as gaining $50 feels good. Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for this work. (Source: Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk.” Econometrica, 47(2), 263-291. Also: Nielsen Norman Group, “Prospect Theory and Loss Aversion.”)
For marketers, the practical implication is significant. “Here is what you will lose if you do not act” is, on average, more motivating than an identically valued message framed as “here is what you will gain.” Fear of loss is a more powerful short-term motivator than hope of gain. This is why fear appeals have been so durable across so many decades and so many categories.
There is a limit, though, and research has documented it. Fear appeals are nonmonotonic, meaning more fear does not always produce more persuasion. Studies of public health campaigns found that if messages were too aggressive or frightening, people rejected them entirely. A moderate amount of fear is most effective, and fear works best when paired with a clear, credible, actionable solution. (Source: Witte, K.; Allen, M. (2000). “A meta-analysis of fear appeals: implications for effective public health campaigns.” Health Education & Behavior, 27(5), 591-615.)
The Beauty and Wellness Industry: A Particularly Active Arena
The skin and wellness industry has been one of the most aggressive users of fear-based marketing, for understandable reasons. Skin is visible. Aging is universal. The fear of looking “wrong” or “old” or “broken” is culturally powerful and deeply personal.
Walk through any store and count how many products are sold by telling you what is going wrong with your skin. What toxins are lurking. What damage is accumulating. What you will look like in ten years if you do not act right now. The fear often runs well ahead of the science.
This is the environment Fafabiotic was born into, and it is a pattern we have had to think carefully about in our own work.
Fafabiotic: The Honest Part
We will be honest: it is possible that some of our past ads or communications have carried undertones of fear marketing, even without that being the intention. When you operate in a category this saturated with anxiety-driven messaging, the language seeps in, sometimes without you noticing it in the moment.
What we can tell you is that avoiding fear marketing is a conscious, deliberate choice we make at Fafabiotic, and one we take seriously enough to write about publicly. We also know it comes at a cost. Fear works. The research is clear on that. Leaning into urgency, scarcity, and “here is what happens to your skin if you do nothing” would almost certainly bring in more first-time customers faster. We are choosing not to do that anyway, because we believe the customers we would gain that way are not the customers we are actually trying to serve.
What We Are Building Instead
Fafabiotic was started by Dr. Farzaneh Rezaei, a microbial formulation scientist who spent nearly 2 decades in biological product development before founding this company. She did not start Fafabiotic because of a market opportunity. She started it because her children’s skin was breaking out and her own skin was changing in ways that none of the products she tried actually addressed. She made something for her family first, and it worked.
That origin story matters for how we think about marketing.
Our core product is a living probiotic lotion. The science behind it is rooted in the understanding that skin has its own microbiome, a community of living microorganisms that, when in balance, supports how skin holds moisture, clears itself, and ages. When that microbiome is disrupted, no topical correction addresses the root of what is happening. The goal of Fafabiotic’s formulation is to support balance rather than override it.
That is a genuinely interesting scientific story. It does not need to be sold through fear.
What we are trying to build is something much closer to what Dr. Glen L. Urban of MIT Sloan School of Management described as trust-based marketing: a model where companies earn loyalty by providing honest, comprehensive information and letting customers make genuinely informed decisions. The research supports that this approach builds more durable customer relationships than fear-based persuasion. (Source: Wikipedia, “Trust-based marketing.”)
We are a small company. We make our product in careful batches because living cells require that level of care. We offer subscriptions not because they lock you in, but because this product works through consistency over time, and we want to make it easy for you to stay consistent. We offer a 30-day money-back guarantee because we would rather a customer get their money back than feel stuck with something that is not working for them.
None of that is a fear message. It is just the honest story of what we are doing and why.
Why This Distinction Matters
A customer who buys because they were frightened is not the same as a customer who buys because they trust you. The transaction looks the same from the outside, but the relationship underneath is completely different.
Fear-driven customers are more likely to feel buyer’s remorse. They are more likely to feel manipulated if the product does not deliver overnight. And they are far less likely to become the kind of long-term community members who tell honest stories about their experience to people they actually know.
For a brand whose product works through consistency over time rather than instant transformation, this is not just an ethical preference. It is the only business model that actually makes sense. A customer who panicked their way into one bottle and then stopped is not going to see the results. A customer who understood what the product does, trusted the science, and committed to a few months is the one who will come back, and the one who will tell their friends.
The Closing Thought
The beauty industry is saturated with fear. “Your skin is broken.” “You are aging wrong.” “The clock is running out.” We are surrounded by that language every day, and staying out of it takes active effort.
Our commitment is straightforward. When we talk about what your skin is doing after 40, we frame it as biology to understand, not a crisis to fear. When we share results, we share real customer experiences alongside honest context about consistency and timelines. When we tell you something, we want you to feel informed, not pressured.
Your skin is not broken. It is not failing you. It is a living system that responds to what it is given. And what it needs, most of the time, is support rather than correction.
That is what we are here to offer. Not urgency. Not anxiety. Just honest science, thoughtfully made, and a genuine belief that when you give your skin what it actually needs, it will show you.
Until next blog, Cheers
