The Rolex Effect: How Rolex Branded Your Brain!

Key Takeaways

if the prophet gods were Fair they would say no profit for Rolex watches because Rolex Watchers haven't really innovated in 50 years and Rolex Watchers don't do customer service very well and Rolex watches uh like a simple device that nobody actually needs anymore so we should definitely not have profit for Rolex watches there's been a concept that you shared with everybody who reads the book which is this is it doesn't take a gigantic amount of people for you to reach a state of being over subscribed before we get into that what does over subscribe mean and how is this concept relevant to anybody who is in a marketing space okay if you're in the marketing space you've forgotten lesson 101 of microeconomics right I have and the reason I'm saying that I have right here's lesson one of microeconomics demand and Supply sets the price and demand and Supply creates profit so it's an imbalance between demand and Supply an oversubscribed business is a business that has limited or constrained Supply and there are more people who want that Supply than is available pretty simple it's a hot day there's lots of people out in the in the park there's one little ice cream van and it's got a limited amount of ice cream they are not doing discounts on that day right because there are plenty of people lining up to buy the ice cream there's constrained Supply and there's excess demand what we forget in the digital world and what we forget when we're marketers and where creatives is we forget that it's a simple simple game that demand and Supply set the price and demand and Supply is set profit let me just give you a little example if there was a profit God sitting up on the cloud handing out profit fairly and the profit God says I'm going to give profit to the companies that take the most risk that have the most on the line that have to get everything right they probably would give profit to Airlines they would say well if you're an airline you've got to be safe I have amazing customer service massive capital expenditure huge risks Innovation all this sort of stuff and it would be fair that Airlines should make 50 60 70 profit because of all the things that have to go right in order to run an airline but they don't they make like five percent if the profit gods were Fair they would say no profit for Rolex watches because Rolex Watchers haven't really innovated in 50 years and Rolex watches don't do customer service very well and Rolex watches uh like a simple device that nobody actually needs anymore so we should definitely not have profit for Rolex watches but what happens in reality what happens is Rolex is massively profitable and airlines are not and why because Rolex can strain Supply and has an 18 month waiting list and Airlines have plenty of supply and they're fighting to try and get people to take the seats because those planes have to fly every day anyway this is the principle and the principle that needs to be applied if you're a creative is you need to create an official capacity where that is your official number you need other people to know that that's the official number and you need to let other people know that that official capacity is in hot demand but there are plenty of people who want to buy from you that there's a waiting list and the demand and Supply tension is Rife okay so somebody's gonna be listening to this uh yeah genius applying domain I get it you want to have greater demand and Supply but how do we apply this in the real world in the book you write about this and that you produce many events before and then you just floated the idea and you said you know unless we sell this number of tickets we're not going to do it how you got people to be in this over subscribe State can you walk us through that so then people can understand how this works I wanted to run a workshop we wanted to sell the tickets out if we had a rang through and tried to sell the tickets over the phone or if we had sent out an email and said the tickets are available by the tickets it probably wouldn't have been able to easily sell those tickets but here's what we did instead instead of just trying to sell the tickets we first sent out an email through our partners and through our own database and said we're going to be running an event the tickets are going to be on going on sale next week and the only way to get those tickets is to join a Facebook group that will be the discussion group in the lead up to the event and that's where we're going to drop the tickets now we had told people there was only going to be 100 tickets and when we emailed all the databases they all joined the Facebook group and hundreds of people joined the Facebook group so there was something called demand and Supply tension created and it was uh transparency this is one of the principles in the book called transparency of demand and Supply tension basically transparency is any time the market can see that you're oversubscribed they can see that there is a lot of a lineup they can see people want to want to buy from you what happened is that people could see that three four five hundred people had joined the group in order to get tickets but there was only going to be 100 tickets so when those tickets went on sale they got snapped up within like 20 minutes and that was leveraging demand and Supply tension with transparency foreign