The Super Bowl and Scarcity

The Scarcity Principle tells us that people want more of what they can have less of. Think of luxury goods, champagne, diamonds, or limited editions. From this year's Super Bowl, we take the lesson one step further, courtesy of Richard Siklos' Media Frenzy article in the New York Times, entitled: Beyond the X’s and O’s, a Lesson in How to Be Big.

"A lesson lurks in today’s big show — with its 90 million viewers watching $2.6-million, 30-second commercials and consuming untold vats of seven-layer dip. To my eye, part of the Super Bowl’s pre-eminence stems from one of the savvy and counterintuitive ways in which the National Football League has reinforced its brand value: by emphasizing its scarcity [italics added]."

Siklos goes on to describe how the NFL earns more profit than all other professional sports leagues, despite a schedule that includes only 16 regular season games per team, as opposed to the 82 in basketball, 84 in hockey, and 162 games in baseball. He also cites how the NFL doubled its merchandising revenue (to $3 billion a year) after slashing the number of suppliers by two-thirds.

The major take-away is that the volume of what you offer can sometimes diminish the value of the offering itself. Studies have shown that when consumers are presented with many choices (for example, of jams in an upscale supermarket), they tend to value the product lower – and buy with less frequency – compared to when they are presented with fewer choices under the exact same conditions. What explains these results? Researchers suggest that the number of choices actually becomes a burden, thereby diminishing desirability and attractiveness.

Siklos continues: "Keeping its core product tight and finite is something that the N.F.L. has in common with some other notable media ventures. The astonishing popularity of “American Idol” in its sixth season is partly a testament to the fact that the Fox network has not fiddled with its winning formula and spun off all sorts of additional contests under the “Idol” banner. In other words, it hasn’t diluted “Idol” the way ABC memorably short-circuited the run of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” a few seasons back."

The power of scarcity: people want more of what they can have less of.