Scarcity Appeals in Advertising: Psychological and Social Mechanisms of Consumer Buying Behaviour

Faculty of Arts, University of Nottingham, NG72RD Nottingham, United Kingdom

^* Corresponding author: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Abstract

Scarcity advertising appeals play a key role in shaping consumers’ repurchase intentions in digital marketing. Based on psychological, cognitive, and social perspectives, this paper discusses how scarcity appeals in advertising influence consumers’ impulse buying behaviour. It is worth considering how scarcity causes emotional arousal, influences perceived value and leads to consumers’ House of identity. This study extends Psychological Reactance Theory, Commodity Theory and Symbolic Interactionism to construct a multidimensional model explaining how scarcity messages lead to impulsive choices. Taking two real cases of scarcity marketing as examples, which are Adidas’s limited-edition Yeezy products and Pop Mart’s Labubu blind-box marketing, this research demonstrates how scarcity exerts influence in a cultural context and a commercial context. The two cases show that scarcity marketing is not only an effective stimulus for immediate buying but also helps establish an emotional connection and symbolic meaning between brands and consumers. In this way, scarcity is still an effective and culturally bound strategy in modern consumer culture, which influences behaviour and identity subtly but powerfully.