Everyone who’s ever done the slightest bit of copywriting knows that scarcity is an essential element in driving the sale.

As consumers, the idea of missing out, whether it’s on a certain price point, bonus content, or the offer altogether, is often the thing that pushes us over the edge from hemming and hawing about whether now is really the time to invest in the offer to making the leap and buying.

Sometimes this scarcity is real and sometimes it’s fake, and while I’m fully supportive of using scarcity (at least the real kind) in your copywriting, I’d like to suggest that our businesses would actually benefit by reducing scarcity when it comes to some of the truly valuable offerings for our audiences.

But first, let’s take a look at how most businesses are currently operating so we can understand where the current scarcity lies.

What Most Businesses Compete On

Most businesses, entrepreneurs, and freelancers spend a ton of time worrying about quality.

They agonize over the competitor who they feel has a better offer, content, or marketing (even if only marginally) and spend the vast majority of their effort developing new, higher-quality offers, content and marketing themselves in the hope that by being “the best” they’ll cement their reputation as the undisputed leader of their industry.

But here’s the thing. There is no scarcity when it comes to quality.

These days, almost everything we buy or consume is of at least acceptable quality. Most options available to us are good enough to get the job done, some with a little more friction perhaps, but they’ll work.

Look at YouTube, or Podcasting, or Medium. There is no shortage of high-quality content available to us for free on almost any topic we could ask for.

Sure, you might create something that truly is best in class, but sooner or later, someone is going to come along and create something better.

What’s more, by choosing to compete on quality, you’re entering into a fickle market. Customers who buy the best quality product and looking to buy the best quality product. If something comes out that tops your offer, they’ll move on to it in a blink.

It’s worth mentioning that your quality still needs to be above that minimum acceptable level, and personally, I would put the effort in to fit into the top 10 providers of your content or offer.

But I would argue that the effort required to achieve and maintain the number one spot would be much better spent elsewhere, on areas of your audience experience that are much harder to find, and therefore much more valuable if we can find a way to offer them.

If we agree that quality isn’t worth the effort of competing on, and we certainly don’t want to compete on price, where does that leave us to focus our attention?

Offering What is Truly Scarce

I’m convinced that businesses that win focus on providing resources that are in fact, often more scarce than their product or service, namely, trust, connection, and attention.

Trust, connection and attention are hard to come by not only in our business and consumer interactions, butnincreasingly so in the rest of our lives as well.

More and more people lack close, meaningful relationships.

Our attention is constantly being pulled a dozen different directions but ubiquitous content, push notifications and advertising.

And with the rise of fake news, algorithms, and selective content curation, not to mention deep fakes, it’s becoming ever harder to trust what we see, hear and experience with our own senses.

If we can find a way to foster meaningful relationships with and between the members of our audience, we’ll win.

If we can focus on giving attention to our audiences instead of capturing and holding it, we’ll win.

If we can focus on showing up generously and consistently and building a real, authentic, trusting relationship with the people we seek to serve, we’ll win.

These resources are scarce because they’re hard to deliver on. They require emotional labour, persistence, and the will to show up and lead when we don’t feel up to the task.

Few people have the commitment to their audience and to their work to follow through.

But that’s exactly why you, if you choose to generously create connection, give attention, and build trust, will win.

---

Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!