By: Sofwan Mahmood

In our previous look at the changing advertising landscape, we examined how social media influencers are taking a growing share of advertising budgets from traditional and even digital media. Their power does not come simply from having followers. It comes from their ability to manufacture, at scale, something conventional advertising has always struggled to create: the feeling that you are missing out.

That feeling has a name: Fear of Missing Out, or FOMO.

Many associate FOMO with Gen Z, TikTok and smartphones, but the phenomenon is considerably older. How it evolved from a consumer behaviour first observed in the 1990s into one of the most powerful forces in social commerce tells us much about how Malaysians now consume, compare and buy.

FOMO did not begin with TikTok

Marketing strategist Dr Dan Herman traces his first encounter with FOMO to 1996, while running consumer focus groups. He noticed that brand loyalty was weakening, replaced by a growing appetite for novelty, new experiences and unfamiliar brands. Herman says he coined the phrase “Fear of Missing Out” in 1997 and began using the acronym FOMO in 2002. He identifies the launch of Facebook in 2004 and the iPhone in 2007 as major accelerators.

Academic interest soon moved beyond marketing. In a landmark 2013 study, Andrew Przybylski and colleagues defined FOMO as “a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent”. They found it was linked to higher social-media engagement and to lower psychological need satisfaction, mood and life satisfaction.

The point is this: social media did not invent FOMO. It industrialised it. Before social media, you might hear that a neighbour had bought a new car or a colleague had gone on an expensive holiday. Today you see all of it, instantly.

From social anxiety to consumer behaviour

FOMO becomes commercially important when it moves from the social sphere into the marketplace. A consumer no longer simply sees a product. They see other people using it, an influencer recommending it, comments calling it “worth it”, a countdown timer, “only 17 left”, and hundreds of people buying it during a livestream.

The question changes from “Do I need this?” to “What if I miss this?” That is a fundamental psychological shift.

Malaysian researchers are now studying this shift directly. A 2025 research proposal from Universiti Teknologi MARA sets out to test how scarcity, social influence and promotions drive FOMO, and through it, online purchasing among Malaysian shoppers. Drawing on existing research, the authors point to influencer endorsements and livestream shopping as mechanisms that heighten urgency and purchase intention.

In other words, FOMO has become a commercial mechanism.

Why influencers are perfectly positioned

Traditional advertising tells consumers a product is desirable. Influencers show that other people are already enjoying it. An influencer says “I tried this”; the audience hears “people like me are already using this”. That is social proof.

Then comes scarcity (“Only available today”), urgency (“Live now”), validation (“Look how many people are buying”) and, finally, the transaction: “Link in bio.” FOMO has completed its journey from emotion to purchase.

Malaysia is an ideal FOMO laboratory

Malaysia’s highly connected population makes this especially significant. DataReportal recorded 34.9 million internet users at the start of 2025 (97.7% penetration) and 25.1 million social-media user identities, equal to 70.2% of the population.

The same data shows why FOMO should not be framed as a male or female issue. Social-media user identities were about 54.1% male and 45.9% female. TikTok’s adult advertising audience was almost evenly split (49.3% male, 50.7% female), while Instagram’s was 44.9% male and 55.1% female.

Nor is it purely generational. A 2021 meta-analysis by Fioravanti and colleagues, covering 21,473 participants across 33 independent samples, found robust links between FOMO and both social-network use and problematic use. Age, sex and geographic region did not moderate those links.

So FOMO is not a “Gen Z disease”, nor a female phenomenon. What people fear missing may vary by age, gender, income and interest, but the underlying mechanism is broadly human.

TikTok has changed the equation

TikTok Shop shows how FOMO can be built directly into commerce. In August 2025, TikTok reported more than 1.8 million local sellers and 3.8 million affiliate creators on TikTok Shop in Malaysia, with over 100 million product searches a day.

During its Raikan Raya 2025 campaign, TikTok Shop said Malaysian MSMEs, local brands and affiliate creators achieved 100% year-on-year sales growth, with more than three million affiliate creators and over 1.7 million local sellers taking part. The average number of orders per customer more than doubled compared with non-campaign periods.

This is no longer simply advertising. It is an ecosystem in which content, influence, urgency and transaction all happen without the consumer leaving the platform. That is an extraordinary change in advertising economics.

Khairul Aming: FOMO meets trust

As mentioned in the last article one of Malaysia’s clearest examples is content creator and entrepreneur Khairul Aming. His influence shows that FOMO need not be manufactured through aggressive advertising. Sometimes it grows organically from anticipation.

According to Dataxet analysis reported by Marketing-Interactive, the reveal of his Rembayung restaurant in December 2025 generated about 2.8 million engagements, followed by another 1.2 million as the 6 January 2026 opening approached. TikTok alone accounted for more than 5.56 million engagements across the conversation.

Notably, the excitement was not driven mainly by menus or prices. It was driven by trust, admiration and pride in Khairul Aming himself. People wanted to be part of the moment. That is FOMO in its modern form.

I was guilty of it too. During Ramadan 2026, I followed Khairul Aming’s 30 Hari 30 Resipi with the dedication of a student cramming for finals. Work and time got the better of me and I never completed the full “syllabus”, but I learned something more valuable than any recipe: how deeply the phenomenon had seeped into everyday life. Meeting after meeting with clients ended not with action points, but with the same question: “Has anyone tried the latest recipe? Did yours turn out?”

It became the talk of Ramadan 2026. People from every walk of life posted their triumphs and their kitchen disasters, and the craze knew no boundaries of gender, race or geography.

The numbers bear this out. His caramel pudding recipe, posted at the start of Ramadan, drew more than 22 million views, and a compilation of followers nervously tapping their moulds to reveal the result gathered over seven million views and 900,400 likes on TikTok alone. Malay Mail described it as a national phenomenon “uniting millions across ages, religions, backgrounds and states”. 

Followers treat the series as a “modul universiti”, and when Khairul Aming jokingly held a mock press conference to answer their “complaints”, the parody drew nearly three million views in a single morning, according to Berita Harian. As the pace rose to three or four videos a day, local celebrities and even companies joined in, joking that they could not keep up. Nobody was forced to cook. But nobody wanted to be the only one at the table who hadn’t tried. That is FOMO at its warmest, and perhaps its most powerful.

FOMO doesn’t need millions of followers

Micro-influencers matter too. A food creator with 30,000 highly engaged followers can create more relevant pressure for a restaurant than a celebrity with millions of followers who have little interest in food. Influence is increasingly about community, not raw reach.

This is especially important for Malaysian SMEs. A smaller creator can make a café, product or local fashion label feel like the place “everyone is talking about”. The effect is powerful: “If I don’t go, I’m missing something.”

FOMO is not confined to luxury

This is perhaps the biggest misconception. FOMO is not only about handbags, luxury cars or five-star holidays. Under financial pressure, it becomes more subtle.

The Department of Statistics Malaysia reports that mean monthly household consumption expenditure rose from RM5,150 in 2022 to RM5,566 in 2024, while the median rose from RM4,282 to RM4,758. Housing and utilities, restaurants and accommodation, food and beverages, and transport together made up about 67% of spending.

Malaysians are making decisions where affordability matters. But affordability does not eliminate FOMO; it changes its form. The consumer who cannot afford a RM5,000 handbag buys a RM150 fashion item. The one who cannot afford an overseas holiday chases a viral local destination. The one who cannot afford the newest smartphone buys accessories to make the old one look new. They may not buy the expensive product, but they still buy the feeling of not being left behind.

Influencers don’t create every trigger

It would be wrong to blame influencers alone. They operate within a much larger system. Algorithms reward engagement. Platforms reward transactions. Brands want measurable results. Retailers create scarcity, marketers create limited-time offers, and consumers seek social validation. Influencers are the human face connecting it all.

That is why influencer marketing is so commercially powerful. Influencers rarely create desire from nothing. They amplify an existing human need to belong, participate and avoid being left behind.

From FOMO to “fomsumerism”

Researchers now have a name for it: “fomsumerism”, or consumption driven by fear of missing out. In 2025, a University of Florence team led by Mirko Duradoni published a scale to measure it.

Closer to home, a 2025 Malaysian study based on interviews with 15 young adults found that lifestyle influencers shape how followers see success, self-worth, materialism and consumption. Its title captures the cycle perfectly: “They Post, I Scroll, I Envy, I Buy.”

The influencer posts. The consumer scrolls. Comparison begins, desire follows, FOMO enters, and the purchase completes the cycle.

The other side: JOMO

Not everyone wants to take part. The rise of JOMO, the Joy of Missing Out, shows that consumers can consciously reject pressure to join every trend.

A 2024 study of FOMO and JOMO advertising by Tan, Tjiptono and Tan found that FOMO appeals worked best on younger consumers with a strong tendency to compare themselves with others, while JOMO appeals resonated more with older consumers who compare themselves less.

That may matter more as consumers grow aware of algorithmic manipulation and digital fatigue. The next consumer trend may shift from “I don’t want to miss out” to “I don’t care if I miss out.”

The new battleground is attention

This brings us back to our previous article. Traditional media sells advertising space. Digital media sells access to audiences. Influencers increasingly sell attention, trust, community and action.

FOMO makes that proposition even stronger, because the influencer is not simply saying “Buy this.” The underlying message is “Look what everyone else is doing.” Perhaps the most powerful advertising message of the digital age is not “You need this” but “You don’t want to be the only one without it.”

That is why FOMO matters. It is not a Gen Z phenomenon, not exclusively male or female, not merely a social-media addiction, and it certainly did not begin with TikTok.

FOMO began as an observation of changing consumer behaviour in the 1990s. Social media made it always-on. Smartphones made it permanent. Algorithms made it personal. Influencers made it commercial. And social commerce has now connected it directly to the checkout button.

The battle is no longer simply for consumers’ money. It is for their attention, belonging, identity and fear of being left behind. In that battle, the influencer may have found the most powerful advertising tool of all: the fear that everyone else is already enjoying what you are missing.