A new addition at Security Essen this year is a hall devoted exclusively to terrorism. “Developments in the USA are already far advanced,” the show’s promotional literature says, but the other side of the Atlantic isn’t going to miss out. “A new market segment which is devoted especially to the actions against terrorism is arising in Europe, too.”
Not that the security business really needed a new market segment. Over the last twenty-five years, private security has expanded massively in Germany, the United States, and every other Western country. Tyco Fire and Security, an American company, has ninety thousand employees and $11.5 billion in annual sales. Securitas AB, a Swedish company headquartered in London, has more than 230,000 employees and operations in more than thirty countries. Group 4 Securicor, also headquartered in England, has 400,000 employees in 110 countries.
Most people know the security industry through its ubiquitous pitches for home alarms, whose essential message is usually little different than that of the banner in Essen. Some alarm ads are more visceral, however. One American TV spot depicts a pleasant suburban home bathed in warm, morning sunlight. A pretty housewife kisses her handsome husband good-bye while a jogger passes by on the sidewalk. The husband gets in the car and drives away. The wife goes back in the house, closes the door, and turns on her electronic sentry. The commercial cuts back to the jogger, who stops, flips up the hood on his sweatshirt, runs straight at the front door, and smashes it in with a kick. The alarm blares. The man freezes, turns, and runs. Finally, we see the grateful wife, smiling and safe once again, on the phone with the alarm company.
These ads are not designed to inspire a rational appreciation of risk. If they were, they wouldn’t depict such very unlikely crimes as a stranger smashing in the front door of a home in a prosperous suburban neighborhood at eight o’clock in the morning. (The few alarm ads that do address statistics and probabilities can be just as misleading, however. One ad on my local radio station told listeners they should buy a home alarm because “break-ins are on the rise!”—which the police told me was correct only if one defined the phrase “on the rise” to mean “declining.”)
What these ads do is market fear. Prosperous suburban neighborhoods may not be where the crime is, but they are the most lucrative markets, so it makes perfect sense to threaten suburban housewives with violence if they don’t bolt their doors and buy an alarm.
If my description sounds a little extreme, consider how the unconscious minds of suburban housewives process the information in the ad. Gut can’t blow it off as a meaningless commercial because Gut can’t tell the difference between ads, the evening news, and what it sees out the front window. Gut simply knows it’s seeing or hearing something frightening, even terrifying. Something it can personally identify with. So Gut experiences a wave of what psychologists would call negative affect. Using the Good-Bad Rule, Gut concludes that the likelihood of the portrayed crime happening is high. The emotion may even be strong enough to cause probability blindness, so Gut recoils as if the crime were a certainty. And that’s just one way Gut can process the ad. It could also turn to the Example Rule. The vivid and frightening nature of the ad makes it more likely to grab our attention and form lasting memories. When suburban housewives later ask themselves how likely is it that they could be victims of crime, Gut will easily recall these memories and form the unsettling conclusion: It is very likely.
Of course, Gut doesn’t work alone. Head can always intervene, adjust, or overrule the intuitive judgments made by Gut. As we have seen, though, Head sometimes falls asleep on the job, or its involvement is halfhearted and inadequate. And even when Head does step in, tells Gut it’s wrong, and takes control of the final judgment, Gut keeps insisting there’s danger ahead. Nagging worry may be tormenting to those who experience it, but it is a marvelous marketing tool for companies selling security.
Many others find it handy, too. Politicians promote fear to win elections. Police departments and militaries do it to expand budgets and obtain new powers. And although we tend to think of public-service agencies and nongovernmental organizations as working entirely for the public good, they have vested interests just like every other organization—and many realize that fear is an excellent way to promote their issue, boost memberships and donations, and enhance political clout.
We encounter the messages of these merchants of fear daily, at every turn. It would be impossible to come up with a complete list of the organizations and individuals who stand to profit one way or another by elevating public anxiety. There are simply too many.
It would even be impossible to list all the corporations whose self-interest is served by marketing fear. We saw how a software company spotted a marketing opportunity in the “50,000 predators” said to be trolling the Internet for children. Lighting manufacturers talk up crime before revealing the good news that lighting is an effective way to defeat the dangers lurking in shadows. Companies that sell water filters like to mention the risk of getting cancer from chlorinated drinking water. The opportunities for finding a fear, promoting it, and leveraging it to increase sales are limited only by imagination. And corporate marketers are very imaginative.
Germs were a market waiting to be exploited. Filthy, dangerous, and invisible, germs could be anywhere. And the news is filled with stories about frightening new bugs like Ebola, West Nile virus, SARS, and avian flu, which may not be relevant to the question of what lurks in kitchen sinks and bathroom stalls, but that hardly changes the impression that the world is getting buggier—an impression a great many corporations are only too happy to enhance. The slogan of Purell—a hand sanitizer manufactured by Pfizer— is “Imagine a Touchable World.” It’s hard to miss the implication that the world in its current state is untouchable, a message underscored on Purell’s Web site, which includes a handy list of “99 Places Where Germs Are Likely to Lurk—99 Reasons to Use Purell Instant Hand Sanitizer.” Number 6: subway seats and poles. Number 18: calculator keypads. Number 58: thermostats. Number 67: shopping-cart handles. Number 83: library books. While there is solid evidence that the reasonable use of hand sanitizers in settings like classrooms and day cares is beneficial, Pfizer portrays virtually any object touched by humans as a potential threat and any contact with any such object as a crisis that calls for a squirt of Purell. Welcome to the world of Howard Hughes.
Purell was originally created for medical professionals but it was brought to the consumer market with a publicity blitz in 1997. A gold rush followed and there are now countless brands of hand sanitizers and disinfectant wipes. Commuters can hang on to subway poles with portable subway straps or antibacterial gloves. Shoppers can slip disposable covers onto the icky handles of shopping carts and slip disposable covers over doorknobs and toilet seats in the unfortunate event that they are forced to use a public washroom. Passengers on airplanes can relax and lean back on sterile headrest covers and they can hang “personal air purifiers” around their necks, ostensibly to reduce the risk of contaminated air slipping up their nostrils. Wholesale markets are opening up as well, as restaurants and bars seek to please germaphobic customers with sanitizer dispensers and boxes that automatically spray disinfectant on doorknobs every few minutes. There is even hope for the notorious germ vectors known as children: Germs Are Not for Sharing is a book for preschoolers that asks, “What are too small to see but can have the power to make us sick? Germs! They’re in the air, in food and water, on our bodies, and on all the things we touch—and they’re definitely not for sharing.” Frequent hand washing is important, kids are told. And it’s very important you don’t touch anyone when you play together. No more holding hands and high fives. Have fun but stay safe!