get serious about scarcity and urgency Marketing is all about behaviour management – encouraging a target market to behave in preferred manner – for the first or last time, more often, or less often. Persuasion is often central to managing consumer behaviour. This is the last of five thoughts addressing five of the many persuasion […]

get serious about scarcity and urgency Marketing is all about behaviour management – encouraging a target market to behave in preferred manner – for the first or last time, more often, or less often. Persuasion is often central to managing consumer behaviour. This is the last of five thoughts addressing five of the many persuasion tools in the marketer’s toolkit. Some might be obvious, but none is easy to engage effectively. We have all read an advertisement suggesting that a product is only available at a particular price or for a limited period of time. This is the urgency effect. We have all seen advertisements suggesting that a product is limited in number and that a purchase needs to be made before stocks run out. This is the scarcity effect. Both effects can work. Both effects rarely work as often or as well as they could. Research suggests that some…