Episode Transcript
Key Takeaways
- The amygdala doesn't think. It feels. And people feel before they act.
- Scarcity moves buyers because generations of shortage wired us to grab what's running out.
- Three levers to work with: time scarcity, availability and quantity, and exclusivity.
- False scarcity destroys trust and can hurt your practice more than it helps.
- Used honestly, scarcity gives buyers a reason to do what they already wanted to do.
Why this matters now. Every med spa in your city now runs a countdown timer, which is exactly why lazy scarcity stopped working. Buyers have seen the "ends Friday" sale restart every Monday, and they've priced it in. The honest version still works because the wiring underneath hasn't changed. Before you build another promotion, read stop running cosmetic surgery specials, because discounting is the wrong lever, and the follow-up sequence that doubles closing rates for what to do with the buyers who still stall. If your pipeline needs more buyers to move in the first place, that's our job as a lead generation agency in Toronto.
The Survival Instinct That Makes Buyers Move
The amygdala is pure survival instinct and you can leverage this instinct to get people to take action in your practice and to increase your overall sales in an ethical manner, but in a way that gets people to take the action that they want to take, that they should take, but have not had a reason to take.
Welcome back to another episode of Practice Perfect, the podcast for medical professionals, doctors, and anybody running a professional services business, as opposed to a bricks and mortar store. On today’s episode, we’re going to discuss how to get buyers to take action now.
Meet the Amygdala, Your Buyer’s Lizard Brain
Before we discuss scarcity, we first have to understand what’s known as the lizard brain or what’s medically termed the amygdala. The term amygdala is a Latin term which comes from the Greek amygdalae or almond or tonsil sometimes.
The amygdala is an almond-shaped section of the nervous tissue located in the temporal or side lobe of the brain. It’s really close to the brainstem located deep inside your cranium.
The amygdala causes people to take action because it’s a deep-rooted survival mechanism of the brain.
It Doesn’t Think. It Feels.
It’s responsible for perception of emotions, such as anger, fear, sadness, as well as controlling aggression. So, when people say that they lose it or I’ve lost it, that’s typically what happens.
Another function of the amygdala is to store memories for future use, and they store it in emotions. That’s the interesting thing about the amygdala is that it’s not responsible for cognition. It doesn’t think. It only feels, and it does that because we tend to feel before we act, before we think, and that’s because we survived based on what we feel.
FOMO Is Ancient Wiring, Not a Buzzword
So, where am I going with this in terms of marketing and what it means for your practice? Well, once you have an understanding of the amygdala and once you understand its function and its role in our past, in our evolution, you’ll understand the amygdala is responsible for getting people to move.
This is sometimes known as FOMO, or the fear of missing out. And the reason that we have this is because we are conditioned, we’ve been conditioned over time through our survival and things like shortages and famines.
The Marble Test: Proof Scarcity Runs Deep
If you’ve got access to children, you can see this for yourself and you can prove this for yourself. What I want you to do is find a young child and put a bowl of marbles in front of them. Make all the marbles one color. Don’t pick their favorite color, right?
What you’ll find most times is that the child will pick the singular marble because it’s scarce. There’s no other reason.
The Three Types of Scarcity
So let’s dive into how you can create scarcity to move buyers forward. We’re going to discuss a few types of scarcity now. Those buckets are time scarcity, availability and quantity, and exclusivity. Let’s get into each one of them now.
Time Scarcity: Deadlines Move People
So let’s start with time scarcity. Time scarcity is used when you’ve got a deadline of some sort. So let’s say that you’ve got a Black Friday sale or a Christmas sale or you’ve got a special get into spring event or a summer madness.
The interesting thing about time scarcity is that the closer the deadline comes, the more people take action.
Only Five Left, and Not for Everyone
The next form of scarcity we’re going to talk about is availability and quantity. So you have seen these. These are things like a clearance sale, oversupply, I bought too many of this, only got five left.
The last form of scarcity I want to talk to you about today is exclusivity. So how do we create scarcity with exclusivity? You’ve seen this happen before. For example, with original works of art, limited prints, something that is available only to a certain number of people, VIP products, VIP memberships, fame is a form of exclusivity.
The less access we have to something, the more we want that thing.
The Dark Side: False Scarcity Will Burn You
Now scarcity may sound like the next best thing. It may sound like it’s something that you should be using right away and it’s something that’s really advantageous and you want to apply it immediately, and I hope you do. But before you do, I don’t want you to stop listening to the podcast before you understand the dark side of scarcity.
If you don’t use scarcity correctly, you can actually harm your practice more than you help it. The first thing you have to keep in mind is that you never want to create false scarcity.
Put Scarcity to Work This Week
I hope that was helpful. I hope that you start to use time, availability, exclusivity in your practice. I hope that you go back to your practice and start brainstorming with your staff and start thinking of new promotions and new ways to start using scarcity.
I wish you all the best and I will see you on the next episode. Thank you and good day.