Anticipation Effect
Why people enjoy waiting for rewards more than receiving them, and how to use the anticipation effect in your marketing.
In this issue
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You know that feeling of booking a vacation and noticing how the weeks before feel better than the airport ever does?
That phenomenon has a name—the Anticipation Effect.
We love rewards. But we enjoy waiting for them, too. Often more.
Behavioral economist George Loewenstein found people would pay more to receive a pleasure days from now than immediately. Even a kiss from their celebrity crush.
The wait wasn’t a cost. It was the appeal.
Science backs this up at scale. A study of 1,530 Dutch adults reports that vacationers were happiest before their trip. And no happier than non-vacationers after returning.
The mechanism: our brains release dopamine when expecting a reward, not just receiving it. Anticipation is consumption on credit and the interest rate is zero.
You see it everywhere. Counting down to Friday. Pre-saving an album. Refreshing a package tracker like it owes us money.
Most marketers treat the gap between purchase and delivery as dead air. It’s not. It’s free emotional real estate. Here’s how three brands built on it.
Three ways to leverage the Anticipation Effect
Sell the wait itself
Telfar’s bags sold out instantly, with bots scalping stock.
The fix: the Bag Security Program.
For a limited window, anyone can pre-order any bag, any size, any color. Telfar makes every bag to order — and ships months later.
Customers happily pay full price today for a doorstep delivery in autumn. The wait became part of the brand story. Bonus: pre-orders financed production. No overstock or markdowns.
Brand your out of stocks: if demand outstrips supply, don’t apologize for delays. Brand them. A named pre-order ritual turns “out of stock” into “worth waiting for.”
Gamify the queue
Before launching, Robinhood put up a one-field landing page.
Drop your email, see your exact place in line.
Access then rolled out in limited waves, so the wait always had a finish line in sight.
It was a genius move. Every refresh delivered a tiny dopamine hit. Users marketed the product just to shorten their own wait.
If you’re launching a new product or a new feature, show a live queue position and a way to jump it. Make waiting feel like winning.
Serialize your launches
Supabase ships features year-round.
But every quarter, it bundles announcements into Launch Week: one reveal per day, five days straight, same time each morning.
Fifteen editions in, developers await it like a season premiere — complete with hackathons and community meetups.
The predictable rhythm trains the audience to anticipate, amplify, and come back tomorrow.
The model worked so well that many devtool startups have adopted it.
How to apply this: stop dumping your roadmap in one changelog. Schedule reveals, tease tomorrow’s, and let users count down with you.
Your customers trust strangers more than they trust your ads
It’s social proof in its purest form: a real person who bought your product, recommending it to their own audience.
Stack Influence scales that trigger – micro-influencers purchase on Amazon and post authentic UGC, firing the bandwagon effect at scale.
Brands like Unilever have seen 10X returns in two months.
META AI: Facebook launched AI Mode in search and now answers questions with AI-generated responses. These outputs are pulled from public posts, Groups, and Reels instead of the usual link list, meaning your organic content can now surface in answers. Good for visibility.
TIKTOK: Remember newspapers? Aussies under 25 mostly don’t. The 2026 Digital News Report shows 60% have never used one for news, while this app now informs nearly half of 18-to-24s. Social media ranks second overall and chatbots are gaining ground, so plant your messages where your audience scrolls.
B2B:Buyers want to buy a safe product more than the best product, according to a new LinkedIn report. LinkedIn calls it “Buyability,” a model built on the idea that committees are who you’re really selling to. Clear the emotional bar that lets a committee commit, and you’re in.
CREATORS: Hitting a wild new record, MrBeast became the first creator to cross 500M subscribers, livestreaming the moment to 600,000 viewers. His advice is that mastery takes 100,000 hours, not 10,000. Make of that what you will.
ICYMI, last time we looked at Pain of Paying.
The “Eagerly anticipating” Crew.
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