The product marketing case against fear-based marketing
A few months ago I killed a homepage headline that said Your crypto is a target.
It would have converted. In the security category, fear is the most reliable click you can buy, and “target” is the word that buys it. The line we eventually shipped, You have the login. They have the power., converts more slowly, asks more from the reader, and sounds nothing like what our competitors are writing.
I want to walk through what changed and why, because I don’t think most PMMs in security categories get to watch this decision play out in public. Fear dominates our space for a reason. It works. The argument I want to make is that what it works for and what it works against are not the same thing, and most of us are only measuring one of them.
The fear playbook works. That’s the problem.
You know the playbook. Open with a number that scares people, then a story about someone who lost everything, then a CTA that promises the only path out. It’s a clean piece of machinery. It’s been refined across a decade of security marketing because it converts, and because the metric most PMMs are graded on, top-of-funnel conversion, rewards exactly the emotional state it produces.
I’m not arguing the playbook doesn’t work. Of course it works. It works the way a slot machine works. The pull rate is reliable and the math at the casino’s end looks great in a quarterly report. The question I started asking, slowly, was who actually walks up to the machine when you build it that way, and what happens to them after they pay.
Most of us never get to see that part of the funnel. The PMM is graded on the click. The retention numbers belong to a different team, the support tickets belong to another, and the return-rate spreadsheet rarely makes it back to the person who wrote the headline. So the feedback loop closes around the metric that’s easiest to measure, and the ones that actually carry the cost stay invisible.
Who’s buying when you sell with fear
The buyer who converts on a fear-based ad is a specific kind of buyer. They arrive anxious. They expect the product to resolve the anxiety, because that’s what the ad implicitly promised. When the product doesn’t resolve it, because no product can resolve underlying anxiety about money, they don’t conclude that the ad oversold. They conclude that the product underdelivered.
That buyer is harder to support. The underlying problem isn’t a product problem, so even good support can’t close the ticket in a satisfying way. Returns are higher, because buyer’s remorse is a feature of decisions made in a panicked state. And advocacy is almost nonexistent, because nobody recommends a product they bought when they were scared. The recommendations that drive long-term growth come from people who believed in something at the moment of purchase.
I don’t have a clean published number to throw at this, and even if I did I wouldn’t trust it as a single piece of evidence. What I have is the pattern that shows up in support tickets, in returns, and in how customers talk about us in their own words on Reddit and Trustpilot months after they’ve bought. The ones who arrived through a conviction story are the ones who write the long, generous reviews. The ones who arrived scared are the ones who write the angry ones, and they’re often angry at things the product was never going to fix.
If you’ve worked in a category where trust is the actual product, you’ve felt this pattern even if nobody’s named it for you. Fear is a high-velocity acquisition channel and a low-velocity advocacy channel, and most of us are running it like the first half is the whole equation.
What we actually changed
When I joined Trezor, the marketing was anchored to a tagline that had earned its keep. Crypto security made easy. That line carried the brand for years, and it did honest work. The product is a security device, the category was new, and explaining it without that frame would have been harder than it needed to be. I’m not throwing the old line under the bus. After all, it got us here.
But after about a year of working inside that frame, the limit of it started to show. Crypto security made easy implies the customer needs help with something hard. The subject of the sentence is the product, doing the easing. The customer is the recipient of a service. That positioning slots Trezor into the same category as every other security product on the market, and it asks the customer to feel grateful rather than capable.
That isn’t the actual story of self-custody. The reason crypto matters at all, the reason any of this is worth marketing, is that it’s the first asset class designed to be owned outright, without intermediaries and without permission. A hardware wallet isn’t a thing that protects you from a scary world. It’s the thing that lets you own your money the way you already thought you did.
So we rewrote it. Working with the head of marketing and our CCO, we replaced Crypto security made easy with Take control. The new line moves the subject of the sentence from us to the reader, and it changes the verb from passive to active. That sentence-level shift is the entire move, and it cascades through everything else.
The homepage rewrite is where it got concrete. The old direction had a problem statement headline that said Your crypto is a target. It’s a fine line for what it is. It names a threat and implies a defender. Standard security marketing.
The replacement we shipped is You have the login. They have the power. Read those two lines next to each other, because the difference is the whole article.
The first one says a hostile force is coming for you, we can help. The second one says the arrangement you’re already inside is quietly working against you, and you can change it.
There’s no threat actor in the second line at all. The “they” is the platform, the custodian, the exchange, the app where your funds technically live. The reader isn’t being asked to feel afraid of an attack. They’re being asked to notice an asymmetry they’d been ignoring. That’s a more durable motivator. Anxiety wants relief and forgets you. Recognizing an asymmetry wants change, and change is what gets someone to actually buy a hardware wallet, set it up properly, and tell their friends.
The principle underneath the rewrite is something I keep coming back to. We stopped writing copy where Trezor was the hero and started writing copy where the reader was the hero. The product became the tool, not the savior. At the sentence level it’s a discipline, and it shows up in whether the subject of your sentence is “we” or “you.”
The cost
Worth being honest about what this approach costs. If you’re reading this thinking about pitching it inside your own company, you should know the trade-offs going in.
Conviction-led copy is harder to write than fear-based copy. Fear writes itself. The structure is a known good and the emotional engine is hardwired. Empowerment requires actual substance, because if you’re telling the reader they’re capable of something, you need a product that actually makes them capable, and you need words that don’t break under scrutiny. The first few weeks of rewriting our pages, I noticed how many of the easy patterns I’d been reaching for were quietly fear-shaped, and I had to find new patterns that weren’t.
It also converts slower at the top of funnel. Anxiety produces clicks. Recognition produces something quieter. There will be moments, especially during a soft month, where leadership looks at the dashboard and asks whether you’d reconsider one or two punchier lines. The honest answer is that you can, and the cost shows up later, in places leadership isn’t looking at as closely.
And the approach demands a product that can hold the claim up. You can’t run empowerment copy on top of a paternalistic product. The copy will expose the gap. If your onboarding tells the customer what to do without explaining why, or your support resolves things on the customer’s behalf without teaching them anything, the marketing will start to read as a lie. The PMM has to either fight for product changes that match the positioning, or stop making claims the product can’t back up. There’s no third option that survives a week on Reddit.
Who this is actually for
Most of what I’ve described is specific to Trezor and to crypto, but the underlying decision applies anywhere trust is the product. If your category runs on fear, the question worth asking is who’s actually buying when you do that. Then ask whether you want more of those buyers or fewer of them.
I think about the killed headline sometimes. Your crypto is a target would have worked. It would have hit a number. The line we shipped instead asks something harder of the reader, and it asks something harder of us, because we now have to keep being a company that earns the second sentence rather than the first.
Selling through fear is easy and it converts, and what it converts is a buyer you don’t want. The harder playbook is harder, and the buyer it converts is the one who keeps the company alive long after the campaign window has closed.