We could have an interesting philosophical debate about whether it’s desirable that so many of us have become weapons of mass consumption. We can make a good case for the many perils of an always connected, constantly distracted, FOMO-driven, social-media-obsessed culture. Real societal questions can be raised about the power and wealth that have shifted to an elite few in this age of digital disruption. But there is no denying that the diminishment of key elements of scarcity has changed just about everything that was once important in most businesses.

Not too long ago, plenty of brands could get away with good enough.Their focus was on scale, serving the peak of the bell curve, providing average products for average people. Yet when customers have vast information at their fingertips, access to just about anything they want, whenever they want, from wherever they want, why should they settle for average, merely acceptable, unremarkable, mediocre, or boring?

Not only shouldn’t they. They’re not.

Our mission—should we choose to accept it—is to build new sources of scarcity that can be proprietary to our brand. These days building scarcity around information, access, choice, and connection is hard, if not impossible. Most times scarcity in items that are cheap and convenient can only be maintained for a short time. For some brands scarcity is created and protected by highly defensible patents or natural monopolies—but for most retail companies this is rarely an option.

Instead, this new scarcity must be built around commanding attention in new, interesting, and memorable ways, creating incomparable experiences, and earning customers’ trust by knowing them better than the competition and delivering on a promise over and over again.Mostly, we need to create a brand story that moves them, that customers become enrolled in, and that they feel compelled to share, to spread, to (quite literally) remark upon.

The above is an excerpt from Chapter 2 (“The End of Scarcity”) of my new book Remarkable Retail: How to Win & Keep Customers in the Age of Digital Disruption, which debuted this week as Amazon’s #1 new retail release. You can read the first chapter for free here.

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