“Are you going to buy anything this Black Friday?” is a phrase more than a few of us can admit to having either heard or asked towards the latter end of November each year. Whether you want to get ahead of your Christmas shopping or spoil yourself rotten (winter blues and all), we can all agree that the marketing surrounding Black Friday is very effective at getting us to click.
But why is this? With roots in the United States, Black Friday is now a global phenomenon that millions of people strive to take part in. Originally, as a day of high-street chaos, today our social media feeds are enveloped with invitations to “buy now!!!” and “click here!”.
This phenomenon is known as urgency marketing. a psychological tool used to convince consumers to act quickly. Want to learn what makes us click? Read on to find out about the psychology behind urgency marketing.
What is urgency marketing?
As with all other marketing techniques, urgency marketing is used to drive consumers down the sales funnel. From being merely aware, to interested, desiring and thus purchasing. Urgency marketing prompts consumers to purchase quickly and is effective because it triggers various psychological behaviours. These include:
Fear of missing out (FOMO) is the perception that others are having more fun, living a more fulfilling life, or receiving better things than oneself. It is rooted in the desire to stay connected with other people. In marketing, this manifests in the form of limited-time offers and discounts with an emphasis on time-sensitivity. You’ll see it in phrases such as “take action now!”, inviting you to run, don’t walk, to these unbeatable deals. Social media exacerbates this, with online personalities and influencers sharing what deals they snagged this season.
Loss aversion is a cognitive bias in which the impact of a loss is felt much more intensely than the impact of a gain, even when the value is equivalent. According to the original research, the torment of loss can be twice as powerful as the equivalent gain.
Loss aversion plays a large role in marketing, with various methods using it to convert customers. These include discounts, free trials, pre-ordering, mailing lists, samples, and more.
You can see it in action through the wording of Black Friday offers. For example, posters plastered with phrases such as “Don’t miss out!” or “Save £100 right now!” all take advantage of this form of cognitive distortion.
The Scarcity Principle plays on the notion that users are more likely to find fulfilment in things they find rare rather than abundant. Its goal is to enhance the desirability of a product or service to get consumers to act quickly. It often uses time-sensitivity to limit a product’s availability, playing on both loss aversion and FOMO.
Think when products are limited edition, or ‘premium’, this wording uses the scarcity principle to elicit quick action before it’s too late!
All these methods work together to provoke feelings of pressure to act quickly, as you may lose out on a limited-edition pair of shoes you’ll never have the chance to buy, or pass up a once-in-a-lifetime holiday discount you may never see again…
Urgency Marketing on Black Friday
Black Friday advertisements are made to trigger emotions, not logic. You may not be able to prove there are “only two left in stock” or that something truly is “in demand”, but it still prompts us to act quickly. Black Friday plays on human desire to win by gamifying the shopping process, creating competition, paired with the festive atmosphere, inviting us to spend. This creates a recipe for emotion-driven decision-making. And time and time again, emotion is proven to be a much bigger driving factor for decision-making than logic.
Want to make your brand stand out using urgency marketing and more? Get in touch and let’s chat. No fuss or jargon, just honest conversation.
