Emotional Appeals. Fear, guilt or disgust?

Sorry for starting off with this image; but after seeing this image on pinterest, I knew I had to repin it, twitter it, post it on my facebook wall and reblog it! To be honest though, the reason I chose to share the image was not because I felt like I wanted to convince people to live more sustainably in terms of using their washing machines — there were better alternatives to do that. What this french-speaking company defipourlatere.org did was taking a drastic measure in terms of using fear/guilt based emotional appeals to capture its audience. After seeing this image, I felt disgusted, scared and a whole bunch of other negative emotions bundled up. This illustrates the point we learned in class about how companies like GreenPeace create such a high level of fear that all message-decoders feel are anxiety, but are left with no clear instructions as to actions to take to reduce these emotions.

I found this image on pinterest, and after visitng defipourlatere.org to find out more about this company, I realized that it’s all in French. I wasn’t able to get much out of it; but I just felt like this image is pretty thought-provoking, but perhaps not the right thoughts are provoked. I question the credibility of this fact the company is illustrating, and I wonder what this company’s objectives are.