Why Burberry 🔥Burned $13M of Its Own Products

Creating urgency is a surefire way to drive demand. But how you use it can make or break your brand.

For certain types of brands, cutting supply won't create urgency.

Only cutting prices.

For others, urgency is all about limiting supply.

Not lowering prices.

And for some types of brands and industries, it's a mix of both.

For example, premium brands avoid discounts at all costs.

Many would rather burn excess inventory rather than put it on sale - literally.

Burberry got some bad press for burning nearly $13M worth of their bags, clothes, and perfume in 2018.

But Burberry aren’t the only brand guilty of destroying excess inventory:

Buy-backs to recycle or destroy unsold inventory is a common practice for premium brands, in order to control supply and avoid aggressive discounting that could damage the brand.

Discounts undermine the desire for exclusivity that drives premium and luxury buyers, lowering the perceived status of the brands (and their value).

That’s why for premium product brands limiting supply is a much more effective driver of urgency than cutting price. Messages like:

• "Only 10 available"

• "Limited edition”

• "Waitlist only"

…help make premium products seem more exclusive and scarce.

I saw first-hand how different types of urgency could make or break sales in a client’s business.

PL runs a solo consulting firm that also sells digital courses.

For years he limited seats in these courses to create urgency and drive sales.

And for the past 8 years of his business, that had worked.

Seats sold out quickly and his waitlists were always full.

But over the previous 18 months it had basically stopped working.

Sales were sluggish and 80% of the time, he couldn’t fill the so-called “limited” seats.

He didn’t understand what was going on and it was taking a toll on his mental and financial health.

PL was in a spiral, asking himself questions like:

Was his audience worn out? Were they not interested in his expertise anymore? Were his emails going into spam? Was he shadowbanned on social media? Did they all suddenly hate him, or had a competitor stolen his buyers out from under him?

After more than a few sleepless nights, PL signed up to work with me one-on-one and figure out what was happening and how to solve it.

Since he’d first launched his offers, the digital course market had matured.

More people are selling digital courses now, so buyers are a lot more savvy now than they were in 2016.

They’d figured out that people could sell one or one billion copies of a digital course and it wouldn’t make much of a difference to the seller - there was nothing truly limited about PL’s “limited seats.”

So trying to drive urgency with a scarcity message of “seats are running out” was toothless…

And buyers knew it.

So PL and I worked together to create a hybrid approach - using scarcity and discounting in combination, to drive digital course sales without cheapening his higher-priced consulting offers.

This new hybrid approach revitalized the course side of PL’s business, driving sales 220%+.

But most importantly, this new strategy created more consistent cash flow that gave him some psychological relief…

All while making his core consulting offer look even more premium and appealing.

When it comes to marketing psychology, no principle is one-size-fits all.

How your business uses principles like Urgency will depend on your buyer, brand, industry, and offer.

Context determines if it’ll drive sales, or fail.

That’s why in this week’s new Skill Session, The Psychology of High-Converting Landing Pages: The Template That Converts at 70%+. I’ll show you how to use principles like Social Proof and Urgency in a way that builds your brand.

While driving your conversion rates up too.

I’m sharing dozens of specific examples of how to use marketing psychology principles like these in different contexts.

I’ll also share lots of content templates, swipe files, and more.

All so you can land more buyers and increase your sales and cash flow, faster.

This Skill Session is happening in 2 days, and you can get a Guest Pass for $49.

Everyone who registers will get lifetime access to the recording and all the materials, so don’t worry if you can’t make the day or time.

Until next time,
Jen