FEAR APPEAL STRATEGY AND CUSTOMER PATRONAGE OF INSURANCE FIRMS IN PORT-HARCOURT.

Abstract

This work studied the relationship between fear appeal strategy and customer patronage of insurance firms in Port Harcourt. The study adopted a cross-sectional survey design. The population of the study consists of all customers of the 18 registered insurance firms in Port Harcourt making the study population an infinite one. Adopting the Krejcie and Morgan sample determination table, we arrive at a sample size of 384 for the study since the population is above one million. Thus, 384 customers of the 18 registered insurance firms constituted the sample size. Structured questionnaire was used as the instrument for data collection to elicit responses from respondents. The instrument was structured in a 5-point Likert scale ranging from strongly agree, agree, undecided, strongly disagree, and disagree. The study instrument was subjected to content validity and reliability test. The reliability test was done using the Cronbach’s Alpha test using a bench mark of 0.70 as the acceptable threshold. A test result of 0.84 confirms the reliability of the instrument. Simple regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses and the findings was that there is a significant positive relationship between fear appeal strategy and customer patronage of insurance firms in Port- Harcourt. Base on the findings, the study recommend amongst others, the sustained use of fear appeal by insurance firms to attract customers patronage in Port Harcourt. To this extent, an aggressive use of fear appeal strategy in advertisement in the electronic media and the social media is highly recommended to attract customer patronage.