TruckOSaurus said:
I would be more open to this idea if the Switch was selling Wii U-like quantities each week and they were telling us it's because of production issues but from the numbers we currently have Switch is selling exceptionally well trailing the Wii's debut by about 200k units and the PS4's debut (greatest first 3 months for a console ever) by about 1.2m. Those are great sales number, especially for the period of March through May, it makes the argument for real supply issues much more credible than a marketing ploy to boost hype. |
Using scarcity marketing doesn't really work well if a product isn't popular. It's a marketing strategy that increases sales by giving the impression that a product is limited or scarce thus increasing it's demand and ultimately it's sales. People are more likely to buy it on a whim versus waiting on it when stock is availible.
They not actually selling less when they do this. you just selectively limit the amounts you ship to certain stores so that they sell out to give the impression that the product is scarce.
Nintendo used managed scarcity and scarcity marketing to effectively market the wii, nes classic, amiibos and many of their products to increase their sales.
Here's some articles with explanations of what I'm talking about and that nintendo is known for this or suspected of using this strategy.
"1. Product Scarcity
Scarcity is often used to bolster sales, but it can also be used to create massive brand lift. It plays on the customer’s fear of missing out. Marketers use limited-time offers like daily deals, limitations on quantities, or one-time only promotions to create a sense of urgency and leverage scarcity.
Promoting “out of stock” items is another effective approach to developing product scarcity, as it shows potential customers that your product was so popular that your inventory is temporarily depleted. This strategy has been leveraged by a number of manufacturers in recent years:
Amazon Fire TVs ran out of stock just a week after launch
Nintendo shorted the production of the Wii game console
Apple delayed shipping by two weeks or more on the iPhone 5 just minutes after it launched
You could shrug it off as a supply and demand issue, but these companies certainly didn’t refuse the heightened media coverage and consumer demand that resulted from supply shortages."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sujanpatel/2016/10/22/create-a-demand-for-a-new-product/#f36d9a47e2dd
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"This isn’t the first time Nintendo has had difficulty fulfilling demand for a product. In fact, it’s something of a pattern. Do a quick search for Nintendo Wii managed scarcity and find the hundreds of stories asking, one way or another, Why can’t Nintendo keep the Wii in stock.
Yes, the Wii was successful. But so is the new iPhone, and you can go into any Apple Store in America and walk out with one. The Wii was hard to come by for years. It wasn’t cutting edge technology, by design. It was designed to be affordable. There was no fancy RAM, shortages of which kept the PlayStation 3 hard to come by for a couple months. They just didn’t fulfill demand. One year later. Two years later. All the while, keeping the media narrative of the hottest toy in town alive.
Anyone who buys or, worse still, collects amiibos is all too familiar with this pattern. Simple toy, relatively easy to manufacture, is impossible to find. There are preorders, there are email lists, there’s price gouging from scalpers on marketplaces like eBay.
As of Oct. 2015, Nintendo sold over 21 million amiibos, an impressive figure to be sure for just one year. Meanwhile, Activision had some sold 250 million Skylanders figures as of June 2015, less than four years after the franchise debuted. You don’t hear about Skylanders scalping much, do you?
So either Nintendo is constraining supply, in order to drive hype and awareness and the allure of exclusivity — a holiday narrative as applicable to the NES Classic as it was for Tickle Me Elmo — or Nintendo is just consistently bad at assessing demand and then meeting it."
https://www.polygon.com/2016/11/11/13597938/nes-classic-edition-shortage
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In case you still don't believe of bit of what I'm saying, look up "scarcity marketing".
