Fear Emotion Arousal for Promoting Early Evacuations

- Applying Consumer Information Processing Models to Disaster Mitigation Studies -

Abstract

Though promoting early evacuation has been discussed in many disaster mitigation studies in the literature, late evacuation is still a main issue that we have to overcome. To solve these issues, we discuss about the necessity of a more sophisticated segmentation and effective communication. In this study, we aim to apply methodologies of marketing and consumer behavior to solve the evacuation issues. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), a representative consumer information processing model, was used for our conceptual framework. In our framework, Motives, Ability and fear emotion arousals were used as variables for segmentation. We found that there is different response tendency in each segment, which lead us to a confirmation that our fear emotion arousal framework using the ELM could explain the overall evacuation behavior. As a result, this study implicates that the theorical studies in marketing and consumer behavior could be applied in the disaster mitigation.