By: Schatzi Gheita, Senior Marketing Manger – Quaker MENA, Iraq BU Snacks at Pepsico

I don’t want to start this op-ed by dissing previous generations of advertisers and marketers. What I am about to write is my view on the evolution of advertising and brand strategy rather than an ageist view of older ad schools. 

There was a time from the mid 1970s to sometime in the second decade of the 2000s and sadly still ongoing in some instances when brand owners, marketers and advertisers used the culture of fear to create a need for their product or a want for their brand.

Some created the fear of food and weight gain in order to preserve the exclusive size-0 club.

Some created the fear of being ugly, not landing the job or even worse not landing the man, if you are not fair, or have the perfect lashes or the perfect tan.

Some created the fear of curly frizzy hair to create demand on a variety of hair products tailored to “tame” your curls – to “tame” your wild soul if you ask me.

Some created the fear of being goofy or geeky or natural to endorse a toxic image of masculinity being uber-cool and ultra-swagged. (In fact it took decades of bullying nerds – until they created the top 5-6 Fortune 500 companies. Only then were nerds more accepted and not beaten up walking home from school.)

Again, we get taught fear appeal in marketing schools only referencing examples of public service campaigns against drunk driving or drug addiction, which is obviously a well-deserved fear-inducing argument. What most of the advertising or marketing professors fail to tell students today that more than 80% of advertising and marketing the past half a decade created the mental health crisis we are experiencing today. One would think that the above-mentioned brands, marketers, and companies are under-the-bridge unethical operations. No, they are not. They are celebrated industry leaders, heavily awarded brands, and well-respected companies. It is not a bad apple or it is a whole industry that once normalized creating fictitious fears and emotional traumas to tweens, teens, young adults and adults about what they should aspire to be. They created fears to create demand on products and innovations that are not rooted in any intuitive consumer needs. Innovations that without creating those fictitious fear would have been delisted in a heartbeat.

We – the marketing society of today – have an ethical responsibility to ask:

Are we inducing a culture of fear?

Are we marketing with love or marketing with mental damage?

Are we creating unrealistic and unhealthy standards of beauty that leave our girls and women feeling inadequate?

Are we creating toxic concepts of masculinity that are leaving our men unable to express or channel their emotions?

Are we equating love and acceptance with shallow never-ending cycles of perfectionism?

If the answer is No to one of them. Then, you, we, I, they are part of the crisis.

We have a responsibility to save generations’ mental wellbeing. Act upon it.