Marketing researchers have questioned the use of the fear appeal, believing it to be too difficult to implement properly. AIDS, drug abuse, and other social problems have caused practitioners to return to the fear appeal, but with little direction from marketing theory. The protection motivation paradigm offers a prescriptive model to improve the effectiveness of the fear appeal. The authors propose and empirically test several changes to the PM model. Results indicate that fear appeals should present certain material in a specified order and attack maladaptive behaviors.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.