“Excellent things are rare.”
– Plato
In his 1932 Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, British economist Lionel Robbins defined the discipline in terms of scarcity:
“Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.”
In a perfect world where every valuable asset – from food and water to masterworks of art – was so abundant that it had no cost, there would be no need to make decisions about allocating resources. Economists would have nothing to study and would not have developed theories about the intricate relationship between demand and supply.
Scarcity is a concept rooted in one of the most fundamental aspects of life: we live in a world of limited resources that requires choices about how they are allocated. Leveraging scarcity as a marketing tool is not something new. Stores always have sales “ending soon” or offer discounts that expire on a specific date. Have you ever seen a sign saying “HURRY WHILE STOCKS LAST!”
on brands that make niche products?
This is scarcity marketing.
Come again?
Well, the official definition of scarcity marketing is as follows:
“Scarcity marketing is marketing that capitalises on a customer’s fear of missing out (FOMO) on something.”
It is based on the psychological principle that people want what they can not have. No economic definition requires a product or resource to be unavailable to be called scarce. This was the beauty of Prime’s business model – to make their products so hard to obtain that people would happily pay the price of a used car to get their hands on even one of their rarest flavours. It even inspired a black-market trend where adolescents would pay top dollar or pawn off their beloved Pokémon cards to own the limited-edition BOTTLES of Prime. That’s right, the bottles, not even the drink.
Plus, we all know that Pokémon cards age like fine wine, another prime example of the brilliance of scarcity marketing. Just ask the co-founder of Prime Logan Paul, who owns the world’s most expensive Pokémon card at a whopping USD$5 million.
Business is booming for Paul and KSI!
