Neu­ro­mar­ket­ing has recently been look­ing at The Scarcity Effect:

WORCHEL, LEE, AND ADEWOLE (1975) asked peo­ple to rate choco­late chip cook­ies. They put 10 cook­ies in one jar and two of the same cook­ies in another jar. The cook­ies from the two-cookie jar received higher ratings—even though the cook­ies were exactly the same! Not only that, but if there were a lot of cook­ies in the jar, and then a short time later most of the cook­ies were gone, the cook­ies that were left received an even higher rat­ing than cook­ies that were in a jar where the num­ber of cook­ies didn’t change.

In a follow-up post they look at the case of Knob Creek whiskey using scarcity in their lat­est mar­ket­ing cam­paign (after they announced that there’s a chance they “might run out of their sig­na­ture bourbon”):

If sup­ply is indeed short, why not cut back on adver­tis­ing, save a few bucks, and still sell 100% of your inventory?

The answer is brand­ing. Should Knob Creek be known sim­ply as a pre­mium bour­bon, or the bour­bon that was so good it became unavail­able? Should the stan­dards used in the cre­ation of Knob Creek be high, or so high that its mak­ers wouldn’t com­pro­mise their man­u­fac­tur­ing and aging process to make more available?