What do guns, burglar alarms, and condoms have in common? Their sales all boomed in 2009, with condom sales jumping 22% over the same period in 2008. But why?

When you are told repeatedly that the world is buckling under the weight of a financial crisis, the first line of defense is to save whatever money you have. That sets a whole new train in motion. Suddenly your local retailer around the corner loses revenue from your less-frequent visits. They are forced to lay off staff, who in turn are spending less, and in fact are no longer buying your products. It becomes a cycle somewhat akin to a self-fulfilling prophecy. We’re told it’s a crisis. We stop spending. They stop spending. Everyone from producer to retailer suffers. And the economic meltdown keeps on melting.

As sophisticated as we have come to believe we are, we need to remind ourselves that we’re not that far from our evolutionary relatives–primates who live our lives taking care of the most basic needs–food, sex, sleep, and survival.

In an atmosphere of fear, we tend to revert back to our basic needs, and this may explain why we’re stocking up on condoms, buying weapons, and installing burglar alarms.

A recent neuroscience study shows that fear is a far bigger driver than we would ever care to admit. Fear of losing our job, fear of not being able to make the kids’ school payments, fear of ending up in the proverbial gutter. These thoughts are scary enough to bring on an instant anxiety attack. When we’re operating in survival mode, fear and sex become our two main drivers.

When President Johnson ran his “Daisy” TV commercial, which threatened voters with nuclear annihilation if he wasn’t elected, the voters hated it. George W. Bush tapped into a similar zeitgeist in 2004. His commercial, showing wolves crossing the border as stealthily as terrorists, he instilled the self-same dread and fear. Both TV commercials aimed to knock us square on the amygdala, the region in our brain responsible for generating fear. Voters spoke of their dislike for both commercials, yet what brain scans showed was that as a consequence of these ads, voters favored the politicians that would best “protect” them.

From the very first days of the U.S. recession, all three big car manufacturers announced unheard-of discounts to shift their stock. They continue to offer their cars at cost, and despite this, nobody’s buying. The problem is not the cars, but the proposition which has failed to take the fear factor into account. People who fear for their jobs are hesitant about spending money on a big-ticket purchase. The Korean car manufacturer Hyundai took this cautious mood into account and began and offering very real assurances. They say, “Buy any new Hyundai, and if in the next year you lose your income, we’ll let you return it.” In just a month Hyundai increased its sales by more than 20% in the U.S. alone. You may wonder if the company’s sitting with a lot of returned stock. Well, as this goes to print, supposedly only two cars have been returned.

You cannot build brands in a recession unless you are able to manage fear. It’s essential that you understand how fear works, and consequently how it affects purchasing behavior. Fear is often as irrational as everything else in our lives. When a plane crashes, the airline industry allows for 10% less traffic in the weeks that follow. Yet you don’t have to be a statistical genius to know that the chances of a second plane crashing shortly after are substantially lower than before. Irrational propositions become more powerful than ridiculously high discounts.