Mediating Effect of Ad Scarcity and Attention on Recall for Ephemerality in Marketing: An Abstract

‘Only 7 left in stock’, ‘Only 7 days to claim’: the scarcity of a product/product deal has been well-established in the academic literature about marketing as leading to positive consumer cognition and behaviour. However, the scarcity of advertisements themselves due to short duration (i.e. ‘This ad will only last 7 seconds’) has received very little academic attention. The key question for theorists and practitioners is, does an advert which is ephemeral (i.e. scarce, and accessible only once for a few seconds) outperform those advertisements which are accessible over time (non-scarce)? Marketing practitioners often take advantage of scarcity in developing promotional campaigns for product/services. Through scarcity, consumer perceptions regarding product quality and desirability could be altered to enhance the consumers’ perceptions of the product/service’s value.Predominantly, two type of scarcity appeals are used by marketing experts: limited-time scarcity and limited-quantity scarcity. Scarcity advertising raises a product’s value as perceived by consumers, hence influencing consumers’ attention to the advertisement (Eisend 2008). Significant research has been done on various aspects of consumer attention, including an investigation into internal factors such as motivation, personal choices and mental cognition, and external factors such as environment, product characteristics and advertising features. The ‘Fear of Missing Out’ is the experience of the ubiquitous anxiety that one’s peers are enjoying higher social status or social relationships than the person themself. However, research related to consumers’ attention to advertising (or ad) that is only available for a limited time and consumers’ recall of advertising has rarely been investigated by academic researchers.In this paper, I will contribute to the literature about consumers’ response to limited time availability of advertising through the theoretical lens of scarcity of ads. This paper investigates the relationship between attention and recall under scarcity conditions linked to an advertisement. The key proposition in this paper is investigated in three ways. The first is a discussion of scarcity, in particular limited time/quantity appeals and consumers’ perceptions of value regarding the product/service. Second, we investigate consumers’ ad attention, linking it with resource scarcity for ad effectiveness. Finally, we highlight the importance of consumers’ ad recall and its relationship to scarcity. The key focus of this paper is to contribute, through the theoretical lens of scarcity, the effect of consumers’ attention and recall of ads. An experiment has been carried out to evaluate the efficacy of scarce vs. non-scarce marketing on the attention given to adverts by consumers (n = 110). The findings illustrate that greater attention is paid to an advertisement if it is known to be scarce, leading to greater recall among consumers. This paper also contributes the first empirical support for the use of ephemeral marketing to the academic literature about marketing.