FLEB Marketing Tactic #2 Fake Scarcity
Day 2 of How To Spot a Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand (FLEB).⠀
If you’re a consumer, this crash course can help you make an informed, powerful decision about who you offer your time, money, and attention to.⠀
If you’re an entrepreneur, downloading this free 10-day class can help you audit your own business practices, so that you can:⠀
- Bake justice into your business practices and marketing (and flourish while you do that)⠀
- Make sure you’re creating the social and client impact you intended⠀
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WHAT NOT TO DO⠀
FLEBs build fake scarcity into their sales funnels to pressure you into buying — because when humans detect signs of scarcity, our subconscious survival instincts kick in. We immediately get to work securing the dwindling resources (and…does an evergreen digital course or PDF e-book have a real expiry date?).⠀
The result? A subconsciously-triggered buying decision borne out of deeply coded human fear for survival.⠀
That doesn’t sound anything like real empowerment, does it?⠀
WHAT TO DO INSTEAD⠀
Fake scarcity works because it increases conversion rate — the human survival instinct is STRONG.⠀
How then do you get the same number of sales with a lower conversion rate?⠀
More eyeballs. More audience. More people reviewing the offer.⠀
You can compensate for a lower conversion rate by being more visible and building a bigger audience.⠀
Or you can have a niche specialization where what you offer is so special that almost no one else does it.⠀
Or, if you’re anticipating fewer sales, then you adjust the price.⠀
There are lots of places to intervene in this equation and produce the same financial outcome.⠀
Note: if there is a real deadline or real scarcity, do communicate that.⠀
If there are only 20 chairs in a room, and 14 tix are already sold, it’s important to mention it so people can make appropriate decisions. Real scarcity is valid. Fake scarcity is a scam.⠀
What is the female lifestyle empowerment brand (FLEB)
and why is it a problem?
Female
- Conform to the cultural demands of Ideal Femininity in order to rise
- Reinforces gender dualist/binary
Lifestyle
- Display wealth, privilege & leisure in order to manufacture social authority over other women
Empowerment
- Use the language of feminism & social change to bait a women into following/buying… while doing (oppressive) business as usual.
- Conflates individual success with collective empowerment (they are not the same thing)
Brand
- Teach women how to style themselves as saleable, consumable objects in order to ‘succeed’
- Asks us to erase ourselves in order to perform a brand character
