Happy Thursday.
We’ve spent careers convincing people to buy things. And yet a tiny “almost sold out” badge outperforms most of our copy. Humbling, honestly.
Let’s see how you can make it work.
Reading time: 5 minutes, 02 seconds
11 million emails in 6 weeks: what happens when you stack marketing psychology with a trend everyone already loves
There’s a reason it’s called March Madness. This week alone, 10% of US adults are filling out brackets, and it’s a good reminder of why brackets are so good for marketing
Billboard proved it. Their Fan Army Face Off bracket collected 11 million emails and 130 million votes in just 6 weeks, with users spending over 3 minutes per visit.
Why do brackets hit this hard? Psychology.
- The competition effect makes people engage harder when there’s a winner on the line.
- Prediction bias keeps them coming back because we’re wired to bet on outcomes.
- The IKEA effect means once someone invests effort voting, they value the experience more.
- Endowed progress makes voters feel compelled to finish what they started.
Brackets Ninja lets you build, customize, and scale interactive brackets that capture emails before voting, segment leads by choices, and turn passive scrolling into active participation.
And, it is the brackets season, isn’t it? Don’t be late to the party!
Demand-Based Scarcity
You know this feeling: You’re looking for accommodation online and see a nice hotel. It says “only 2 rooms left at this price.”
Your heart rate spikes. You immediately move to the “Book now” button.
What happens is scarcity heuristic in action.
Our brains use a shortcut: if something is rare, it must be valuable. We process scarcity cues reflexively and often bypass rational evaluation entirely.
A 2022 meta-analysis by Barton, Zlatevska, and Oppewal examined 416 effect sizes across 131 studies. Scarcity cues consistently boost purchase intentions, but the type matters.
- Supply-based scarcity works best for experiences.
- Demand-based wins for utilitarian products.
- Time-based hits hardest for high-involvement purchases.
Here’s the catch: Scarcity tactics lose power when consumers have enough cognitive bandwidth to question why supply is limited. Skepticism kills this effect.
Also, company reputation impacts this a lot. Combine scarcity with low trust and you get suspicious buyers. But if they already trust you, scarcity builds real urgency.
Your brain does this math every time a countdown timer appears. The question is whether the marketer behind it did theirs first.
Three ways to leverage the Demand-Based Scarcity
1) Create demand first, then limit access
Before Monzo ever opened for business, 200,000 people were already sitting in a gamified waitlist, watching their queue position in real time.
Then came the masterstroke: Golden Tickets. After two weeks of active use, each customer received exactly one invite to give a friend.
Not ten. Not unlimited. One.
That single constraint turned every Monzo user into a gatekeeper of something genuinely scarce.
The result? About 40% of signups in 2017 came from Golden Tickets alone—at zero acquisition cost. By 2020, Monzo had 5 million customers and a $4.5B valuation.
The lesson: make access to the resource scarce, not just the product. When people earn the right to share, they curate who gets in and perceived value skyrockets.
2) Build brand trust before pulling the scarcity lever
The cosmetic brand Glossier didn’t start with limited drops.
It started with “Into The Gloss,” a blog where real people shared real routines.
That community became the brand’s foundation long before a single product launched.
Only after building that trust did Glossier introduce limited-edition releases like the Birthday Balm Dotcom and collab drops that sell through Sephora’s app before hitting shelves.
Fans flooded comment sections begging for restocks. That’s demand that earns itself.
The Barton meta-analysis confirms this: scarcity is most effective when brand reputation is strong enough to neutralize consumer skepticism.
Without brand equity, your limited-time offer just looks like desperation.
Build the relationship first. Then introduce the constraint.
3) Use real-time scarcity to trigger competitive arousal
Booking.com layers scarcity signals on every single listing.
“Only 2 rooms left.” “Booked 15 times today.” “Someone is looking at this right now.”
These aren’t decorative touches. They fuse scarcity with social proof to create competitive arousal and the feeling that other people are actively fighting for what you want.
A 2022 study on limited-time e-commerce scarcity confirmed the mechanism. Limited-time notices don’t boost purchase intention directly.
They activate perceived competition among shoppers, and that competitive arousal is what actually drives the conversion.
The scarcity cue builds the arena. Competition closes the sale.
When you stack real-time demand signals on top of limited availability, hesitation doesn’t stand a chance.
Agency Profitability Report: Benchmarks & Trends (2026)
At some point, every agency founder runs the same mental checklist.
“Do we need to raise our prices? Maybe we need a bigger team? Should we just go all-in on AI?”
Planable surveyed 186 SEO and Social agencies and discovered what actually impacts profitability.
Get your free copy to find out what high-profit agencies do differently.
INFLUENCER MARKETING: Sometimes it pays to be smaller. Mid-tier creators are converting sales at 6%, a full percentage point above macro creators, and have grown 10x faster over the past six months. Their audiences are smaller, more engaged, and more trusting. Good to know.
SOCIAL MEDIA: A new BBC documentary features over a dozen whistleblowers from Meta and TikTok revealing how both platforms knowingly allowed more harmful content in feeds to chase engagement and compete with each other. Could this threaten brand safety?
BRANDING: Which brand elements make you unique? A report from Science Says claims that it’s a mascot, a logo, and a font. In that order. Also, stressing over a unique color is a waste of time as 82% of color assets are associated with multiple brands. Unless you’re Coke.
SEARCH: AI agents don’t care how well you rank; they care whether you’re trustworthy. Transparent pricing, third-party validation, and data clean enough to eat off, that’s what matters. So start building credibility now instead of gaming the algorithm or AI will decide for you.
ICYMI, last time we looked at the Egocentric Bias.
The “Almost Sold Out” Crew.
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