Fear Marketing: An Ironic and Critical Contribution

This article presents the world's first academic framework treating fear as a comprehensive strategic marketing ideology — categorically distinct from the sixty-year tradition of fear appeals research (Janis & Feshbach 1953; Witte's EPPM 1992). While prior literature addressed fear exclusively at the message level as a persuasion tool in individual advertisements, Papatya theorises fear as a macro-level systemic mechanism through which the entire marketing apparatus weaponises fear as a driver of consumption. The framework examines how corporate marketing ideology deploys fear not merely as a communication strategy but as a structural logic that organises market relations, consumer psychology, and social behaviour. All subsequent Turkish academic studies on fear marketing cite this work as the seminal founding reference.