The Power of Scarcity: Influencing how you make purchases.
When was the last time you went shopping? Did you ever notice areas that were either completely sold out or only had a few items left? Did they feel like the most popular items in the store?
This is the scarcity effect playing tricks on you. How do I know? Because I’ve played the game.
“1 ticket available,” “order in the next 5 minutes,” “Limited supply!”... this is just a short list of scarcity working against you and your better judgement. Don’t believe me? Let me show you an old, but great study done on the subject of scarcity.
Worchel, Lee, and Adewole (1975) asked people to rate chocolate chip cookies. They put 10 cookies in one jar and two of the same cookies in another jar. The cookies from the two-cookie jar received higher ratings — even though the cookies were exactly the same! Not only that, but if there were a lot of cookies in the jar, then a short time later most of the cookies were gone, the cookies that were left received an even higher rating than the cookies that were in the jar where the number of cookies didn’t change.
So what is the scarcity effect and how does it work?
According to human psychology it is a mental shortcut in which we place a value on items based on their availability. As a result of evolutionary and learned behavior patterns, our brains speed through the process of decision-making without giving any conscious thought. We tend to perceive things that are more difficult to acquire to have a higher value.
So when you book a flight and it says that there’s is 1 seat available, would you be more inclined to purchase it now than to wait?
There are a few variations for the scarcity effect.
You can use scarcity in regards to quantity, rarity, time, or censorship. We encounter these techniques several times per day, but our primal love for processing things at face value has always steered us with the easier route. Here’s another study done to further the point.
Mittone & Savadori (2009) created an experiment where the same food was abundant in one condition but scarce in another. The scarcity condition involved a partner/competitor to create scarcity, while the abundant condition did not. Results showed that more participants chose a food when it was scarce than when it was abundant, for two of of four sets of items (ballpoints, snacks, pencils, and key rings).
You see the trend here? If you’re a marketer, then this should be in your arsenal. If you are a consumer, then you need to be on the lookout. Don’t let these psychological tricks work in their favor, unless you really need that seat 18A for the flight to San Francisco in which you better HURRY BECAUSE IT’S GOING TO BE SOLD OUT AT THAT GREAT PRICE IN EXACTLY 5 MINUTES!!!
