Reality Reconstruction

Read This Before Somebody Else Does!

There are few things that work more to create a unconscious desire to buy or acquire something that scarcity. Even though
scarcity is the oldest trick in the book when it comes to sales, it still works. Any time something is in limited supply, or the time is
scarce, in the form of an impending end to a sale, buying desire can quickly reach feverish pitches.

Why is this? Is this some ancient form of mind control or conversational hypnosis? Is this massive brainwashing on a collective
scale? Some believe that we are trained by governments and industry to become attached to things that we can’t have, so that
we’ll continually be in a buying state of mind.

It’s actually the other way around. For hundreds of thousands of years, Mother Nature, or God, has been programming humans
through evolution to react strongly whenever scarcity rears its head.

Imagine this situation. You have a group of a hundred or so primitive humans. They are largely nomadic, and agriculture is a
thing in the distant future. They have to hunt for every meal. When somebody comes back with a particularly large catch, say a
giraffe, its time to eat, as they don’t know how long it will be until they catch another giraffe.

Now imagine two different genetic makeups. One is a person who takes his time eating, doesn’t push to the front of the line, and
passively waits his turn. The other is a person that when valuable resources show up, he steps on toes, pushes others out of the
way, and gets what he wants.

Which one of these pair do you think will be more likely to pass on his genes? Remember, to mind of a primitive human, an
attractive member of the opposite sex is also a resource. Men fight between each other for the best women, and women fight
between each other for the best men.

So here we are hundreds of thousands of years later. We’ve build cathedrals, sent men to the moon, and create beautiful works of
art that have lasted millennia. Yet deep within us all is that drive to “get it before somebody else does.”

There are plenty of ways that savvy markets use this aspect of the human condition. There are plenty of ways to imply scarcity
about any given situation. Time running out is a scarcity of time. If you receive special information, that is not given to the
general public, that information is trusted much more, as it triggers the scarcity response.

Even waiters, when they use the law of reciprocity when they casually mention to a customer that the fresh fish isn’t all that
fresh, can greatly leverage the effect simply by prefacing their statement with, “I don’t tell this to everybody…” This powerfully
combines the power of scarcity (scarce information) with the power of reciprocity (free, useful information).

When something is on sale, and there are only a few of them left, there is a powerful combination of scarcity and social proof.
Scarcity because the item is limited, and social proof because everybody else wants it. Is it any wonder that every year on Black
Friday (the Friday after Thanksgiving when all the sales start in the U.S.) there are many injuries, and sometimes even deaths due
to stampeding crowds after a discounted X Box?

It is all to easy to succumb to these ancient evolutionary hot buttons. One way to defend against the law of scarcity is to ask
yourself a few questions:

Did I plan to purchase this, or is this an impulse buy?
Could I get a better one someplace else?
Would I be better of waiting for the next model? (As many people should have asked with the recent iPhones).
Would I be so incredibly determined to buy this if there were an unlimited supply and nobody else wanted one?

Sure, it’s tough to think rationally when evolutionary programming kicks it, but if you want to avoid mindlessly following the
crowd, your rational mind is all you’ve got.

If you in sales, you should be applying scarcity every chance you get. Scarcity of time. Scarcity of product. Scarcity of
information. All of these will increase buying temperature of your potential clients, and can make you a lot more money.

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