The Fear Factor in Home Based Business Marketing

Here is a streaming video about a home based business opportunity. The movie spends six minutes extolling the virtues of having a home based business. If you're interested in a home based business and have done some research already, you're not likely to see anything new here. Furthermore, it works mostly by focusing heavily on unearthing your fear. Your fear of financial problems, of not having enough money, of the bad economy, etc.

This leads me to a point: A lot of home based business opportunities are marketed on fear like this. Let's face it - fear sells. It's a tried and true marketing ingredient. Fear is used heavily in marketing to motivate action. You see it all the time in particularly in insurance and medical advertising. But should fear stand on its own?

The movie in question never mentions the business it's promoting. You can tell it's promoting something but it's never named in the movie. Fear continues into the second movie (after you sign up for the email list). The opportunity is finally named in the 2nd movie (I'll leave the name out here), but you get the idea here. Fear creates enough interest to sign up for the email and get to the opportunity they're promoting.

Fear is a good motivator but it shouldn't stand on its own. But because fear is used so heavily on the front end here, it makes one wonder if about the substance of the actual opportunity being sold. Is the opportunity that weak that it needs that much fear as a front end motivator?

What do you think? Does this example go overboard on the fear factor?