In short: Best to avoid fear-based marketing, especially in a time when sales are already up close to manufacturing capacity (and as such, it's not exactly wise to market for additional demand).
However, this isn't to say that coronavirus (in this case: a proxy for fear) can't be used in more subtle ways as a marketing tactic; I say this because I found the campaign described in This Article pretty brilliant; and while it is "suggestive" of coronavirus, its actual meaning goes much deeper.
Here's a quick excerpt from the article, titled, "This hand sanitizer aims to stop a bigger threat than coronavirus", in case you get blocked by the firewall and don't want to create an AdAge account:
"Two workers dressed in hazmat suits gave bottles of hand sanitizer to passers-by. Instead of typical warning labels, the bottles proclaimed 'Stop the Spread.' Closer inspection reveals the bottle is referring to racism, not coronavirus. The listed uses include protection against 'toxic behavior' and directions warn that it 'works best with common sense.' The label also drives users to the campaign's website, which includes statistics and information about anti-racism efforts."
Digital marketing? Maybe not - but it's a great example of the subtleties of messaging in marketing, in general, and the potential to harness one emotion (fear) in order to evoke others (for more thoughts on "Return on emotion" as the new advertising success metric, see my former blog post). To be clear: I'm not disagreeing with the first article's point that fear-based marketing is bad; the distinction here is that fear (already prevalent due to the current state of affairs) is being harnessed in order to capture attention so that this attention can give rise to other emotions around a particular subject of relevance.
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