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Viewpoint #9
The FUD Factor: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt
According to the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) annual report, world economic growth is set to slow. Economists are warning about inflation, over-use of credit and today’s ‘live now, die broke’ philosophy.
But the urge to live like celebrities, and even to divorce in ever-increasing numbers, is also creating whole new social subsets that marketers can target. Here we meet the SINDIES, the Grit Girls and the Tweenagers.
These emerging social categories are symptomatic of more fundamental changes taking place. These changes, we note, are born out of fear and uncertainty. The fear factor comprises old and new terrors: growing old; bio-commerce; becoming isolated; and being young, male and single in a society that has, at last, stopped equating masculinity with income, position, power and success. Uncertainty includes unease about the growing use of surveillance technology to profile the canny consumer; about dying social categories that we are determined to cling to; and about how the brands we buy say as much about our social politics as they do about our tastes.