Everything I Know About Creating Buzz, I Learned From Taylor Swift

From Marc Randolph’s blog

If you’re a startup, everything’s a hack. You figure out shortcuts to develop your product. You use validation hacking to figure out whether customers want it. And you turn to growth hacking to grow it.

One of the most effective growth hacks is creating scarcity—it’s right up there with virality. There’s just nothing like telling people they can’t have something to make them want it even more.

Back when I was in college in the 1980s, Coors had a much better reputation than it does now. It was mythical. According to legend, it tasted better than “any other beer you’ve ever had” because it used special water and lacked preservatives. But this prevented the beer from being sold more than a few hundred miles from the brewery, so it was only available in Colorado. You just couldn’t buy it anywhere else. It was nuts. People back East used to bring a six-pack home with them in their luggage. You could pay for your whole vacation by bringing home a few cases. The scarcity may have been caused by something as simple as brewery capacity, but the company turned it into a marketing triumph.

Years later, when I first began working with the founders of Chubbies shorts, every single item they made was heavily backordered. As was probably the case with Coors, this wasn’t an intentional strategy—they just didn’t have the money to produce enough inventory. But it contributed to the idea of a super-hot desirable product, and in many ways that’s what launched the company.

Scarcity as a growth hack still works. You may have seen it with the social media meteor Clubhouse. Or the email platform Superhuman. Or pretty much every limited-edition sneaker.

And of course, we all saw it last summer as Taylor Swift was kicking off her “Eras” tour. As you probably remember, the clamor for tickets was deafening. It was almost impossible to get one, and those that were available on the aftermarket hit astronomical prices.

I couldn’t help but wonder why, if there was so much clamoring for tickets, why she didn’t just sell more tickets. Or raise her prices.

I’m sure, though, that her ticket pricing was purposeful. I don’t think she purposefully meant to create scarcity. I’m guessing it was actually a mix of three conflicting desires: 1) to do in-person concerts in a relatively constrained venue (a 6,500 seat arena versus a 65,000 seat stadium), 2) to not spend 365 days a year on the road, and 3) to not price the tickets so outrageously that she ended up with an audience of solely rich old white guys.

The result? A very desirable product, a constrained number of tickets, and an unreasonably low price. The trick, as Taylor showed us, is not to match supply and demand, but to purposefully fall short. In Coors’ case, they created scarcity by limiting their product geographically. In Chubbies’ case, it was by limiting production.

But Taylor did three additional things that we all can learn from: