Why Your Best Clients Ignore "Limited Edition"
The lie of scarcity
Every few weeks another brand announces a “limited edition” with the breathless excitement of someone who’s just discovered fire.
Three hundred pieces. Exclusively numbered. Available to a select few, by which they mean anyone with a functioning credit card.
A friend who runs a rather good watch brand tried exactly this last month. Same playbook that had worked splendidly three years earlier. The response from his best clients was a collective shrug so violent I’m surprised it didn’t register on seismographs.
He couldn’t work out why. His clients could. They’d seen the identical trick from six other brands that quarter.
The thing most companies get wrong about scarcity is assuming the mechanism is universal. For a mass market buyer it works through urgency, a genuine fear of missing out, and that’s a perfectly sound tactic.
But someone who’s been buying expensive things for decades isn’t remotely worried about missing out. Something else will come along, or they’ll find it through someone they know, or they’ll just buy something different and never think about it again.
What affluent buyers respond to is scarcity that confirms something about them. A two-year wait because a workshop in the Jura mountains makes forty pieces a year tells you something utterly different from a two-year wait because someone in marketing thought it would build anticipation.
It’s called identity-congruent desire, a fundamentally different animal from loss aversion. You’re not afraid of losing the opportunity. You’re drawn to what owning it says about your taste.
The fly in the custard is that brands keep manufacturing the second kind using the tools of the first. Countdown timers on products sitting in warehouses. Engineered waiting lists for things nobody needed to wait for.
And affluent consumers spot this instantly, because decades of sophisticated selling gives you rather a refined nose for the mechanics of persuasion.
Friestad and Wright called it persuasion knowledge, and when that nose twitches you don’t get indifference, you get reactance, the pushback that happens when someone feels their autonomy is being toyed with.
In luxury that’s devastating. The whole promise is you’re being treated as a discerning individual. Manufactured scarcity says the opposite: we think this will work on you.
The brands that talk most about exclusivity almost always have the least genuine constraint on supply.
The ones that never mention it are the ones where scarcity actually works.
See you in the next one
Paul