Fear, uncertainty, and doubt
tactic used to influence opinion by disseminating negative, dubious, or false information
Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD), or Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt, and Despair (FUDD), is a manipulative tactic used in sales, media, marketing, public relations, opinion polling, and cults. FUD is generally a strategy to influence by disseminating negative, dubious, and false information. FUD is "implicit coercion" by "any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon." It is a tactic based on fear appeal, and shares commonalities with 'fearmongering'.
Origin
The phrase "fear, uncertainty, and doubt" was used in the 1920s. A similar phrase "fear, uncertainty, and disinformation" is also used.
By 1975, "FUD" was appearing in contexts of marketing, sales, and in public relations:
One of the messages dealt with is FUD—the fear, uncertainty and doubt on the part of customer and sales person alike that stifles the approach.
FUD was first used in the sense of its current commonly-associated technology-related meaning by Gene Amdahl in 1975, after he left IBM to found Amdahl Corporation
FUD is the fear, uncertainty and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering Amdahl products.
Examples
Software producers
Microsoft
In the 1990s, the term FUD became most often associated with Microsoft. It has been said that Microsoft borrowed the concept from IBM and used it as a primary marketing tool in the 1980s.
In 1996, Caldera, Inc.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fear, uncertainty, and doubt” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.