Pokémon: Use of scarcity.
My kids love Pokémon. They love the cartoons and the toys, but they especially love collecting Pokémon cards. The appeal is lost on me! Why spend potentially £100’s on something that has no particular function?
Yet, I was equally obsessive as a child, firstly about Panini football stickers, and then Pro Set cards featuring Division One players (the precursor to the Premier League). I’ve never really wondered why, beyond just assuming that I have an obsessive desire to complete a collection!
This week my son spent all his pocket money on a tin of Pokémon cards. He was pretty hopeful that among the many ‘normal’ cards, there would be some rarer cards known as EX’s. And this is when the penny dropped for me. The driver for Pokémon card collectors is scarcity.
I’m pretty sure the manufacturers of Pokémon cards could add more EX’s to the packs. In fact, they could probably even allow customers to select their own cards, perhaps ordering bespoke packs of cards online. But that would defeat the appeal. Customers only want the rare cards because they are rare. Other than scarcity, there is little to distinguish one printed piece of cardboard from another.
Scarcity was particularly noted when Robert Cialdini included it as one of his six (now seven) principles in his bestseller Influence. It is now a widely-applied principle, with marketers communicating limited availability and even creating ‘false scarcity’ to drive consumer demand. Those selling concert tickets and hotel rooms for example can take advantage of limited availability to increase prices.
In my mind though, there are at least two types of scarcity. One is the traditional limited availability, whereby demand is increased by the fear that some customers won’t be served. A second type of scarcity also exists where the resource is relatively plentiful, but availability is time-limited. Both can be effectively employed by marketers to create demand, even for products that have little functional benefit.
