This weeks’ guest speaker, visiting the University of Bolton was Hal Sandbach, he is the Head of Design at d3t. he came and discussed his career with us and gave us advice on our careers. His lecture was very helpful in understanding the industry, where he spoke about his career and giving us advice for we enter the industry. The presentation he had for us was very interesting, all very thought intriguing points, but there was one point he made that really piqued my interest was that ‘if you increase the scarcity of a product, more people will want to acquire it.’ This was a very interesting point because it plays back to supply and demand, but from what I understood was that if you limit the amount of a product or have a limited edition of something, it would make more people want to buy it because it plays into people’s phycology that you want it because there is only a few left. (Birkett, A, n.d.)

 

“Scarcity is the phenomenon where, when a product or service is limited in availability (or perceived as being limited), it becomes more attractive.” (Birkett, A, n.d.)

 

In essence, by decreasing the availability of something, makes that something more desirable because more people want it but cannot have as its limited. This is a brilliant marketing technique, as you could have multiple copies of the same product but by making some of the copies extra special you add more desirability to the product. Obviously, you will have to add extra content to the product, for example, games would release separate DLC’s but then you will have a limited edition copy that would contain all the DLC and the game which is a bonus. It is essentially the same game, the same DLC’s, they are just packaged and produced in a much more fancier way and with the added wow factor of high resolution, the value of the game goes up and it's limited and it attracts the people to come and buy it.

 

References

Birkett, A, (n.d.). 18 Scarcity Examples That Can Boost Sales. [ONLINE], Available at: https://conversionxl.com/scarcity-examples/ [Accessed 12 May 2017].

​

Sandbach, H. (2015). Hal Sandbach. [ONLINE]. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hal-sandbach-7852642/ [Accessed 13 February 17].