The PR BlogDigital PROnline SubculturesFOMO & Digital Trends: You Don't Have To Catch Them All

FOMO & Digital Trends: You Don’t Have To Catch Them All

"Must we become experts on Pokémon Marketing now?"

Cover photo: @jerrysilfwer

How do you escape FOMO—Fear Of Missing Out?

The oth­er day, Anne signed up for my mail­ing list. 

After leav­ing her email address, she was taken to a land­ing page where I asked her to share her biggest digit­al mar­ket­ing and com­mu­nic­a­tions chal­lenge. Anne’s biggest chal­lenge was to keep up with digit­al trends in today’s online landscape. 

With poise, Anne wrote:

Must we become fuck­ing experts on Pokémon Marketing now?”

I feel you, Anne. She shares her frus­tra­tion with hun­dreds of oth­er read­ers who have answered that same ques­tion over the years. 

How can one keep up in today’s wired world? 

Let’s get into it:

The Truth: No One Can Keep Up

No one can keep up with all the new digit­al trends emer­ging all around us. 

You could pick a chan­nel like Youtube and immerse your­self only to real­ise that you must choose a more pre­cise focus. Now, you might try get­ting a handle on Let’s Play walk­throughs, only to learn that you must ded­ic­ate your­self to a par­tic­u­lar gam­ing genre.

Every time you scratch a new shiny digit­al sur­face, an even big­ger online uni­verse opens up. And then—FOMO, again.

The Principle of Scarcity in PR

The prin­ciple of scarcity is well-estab­lished in sci­entif­ic lit­er­at­ure. If some­thing seems scarce, we anti­cip­ate our pos­sible regret of fail­ing to acquire the resource in time:

In 2 exper­i­ments, a total of 200 female under­gradu­ates rated the value and attract­ive­ness of cook­ies that were either in abund­ant sup­ply or scarce sup­ply. […] Results indic­ate that (a) cook­ies in scarce sup­ply were rated as more desir­able than cook­ies in abund­ant sup­ply; (b) cook­ies were rated as more valu­able when their sup­ply changed from abund­ant to scarce than when they were con­stantly scarce; and © cook­ies scarce because of high demand were rated high­er than cook­ies that were scarce because of an acci­dent.“
Source: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1Worchel, S., Lee, J., & Adewole, A. (1975). Effects of sup­ply and demand on rat­ings of object value. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32(5), 906 – 914.

It’s simple: We are pro­grammed for sur­viv­al and will there­fore a) over­value items and ser­vices that are scarce and b) under­value those plen­ti­fully. 2The beha­viour is some­times called FOMO (fear of miss­ing out).

Creating arti­fi­cial scarcity (by lim­it­ing avail­ab­il­ity) is a power­ful PR strategy, but to avoid back­fir­ing, the PR pro­fes­sion­al must refrain from fram­ing the offer using untrue statements.

Read also: The Power of Artificial Scarcity

As a pub­lic rela­tions pro­fes­sion­al who’s been into digit­al com­mu­nic­a­tion for a liv­ing, I would sug­gest anoth­er way of look­ing at it. As I see it, you shouldn’t push your­self to look for everything all at once.

The trick, of course, is to spot the trends that will impact your brand in any mean­ing­ful way.

The Pointless Pokestop

The oth­er day in Stockholm, I walked past a loc­al store for office sup­plies. There was a Pokestop right out­side their store­front, as cir­cum­stance would have it. 3A Pokestop is a vir­tu­al in-game fea­ture of the pop­u­lar mobile game Pokémon Go, a game that blends with real-world loc­a­tions.

In an attempt to grab this mar­ket­ing oppor­tun­ity, they got into Pokémon Go and added lures to the Pokestop — which they advert­ised on a writ­ten sign in one of their win­dow dis­plays. 4Again, for those not up to speed with all things Niantic, a lure is a vir­tu­al item and part of the game. By pla­cing your lure at a Pokestop, you attract vir­tu­al creatures for oth­er play­ers to catch. … Continue read­ing

I got curi­ous and found a café across the street. In an hour, two Pokémon Go play­ers, less than 15 years old, stopped by the Pokestop out­side the store­front, but none cared about enter­ing the office sup­ply store.

Boldly, I assumed that Pokémon Go play­ers gen­er­ally aren’t in the mar­ket to stock up on print­er ink. 

It got me thinking.

I checked the office supplier’s web­site, which wasn’t optim­ised for mobile. The web­site couldn’t tell me wheth­er or not they had cer­tain products in stock or not. Wouldn’t their mar­ket­ing efforts have been bet­ter spent jack­ing up their site? 

Let’s ima­gine that the web­site has 500 unique hits every day. What if the office sup­pli­er had aimed their “cre­at­ive ambi­tions” at those 500 daily web vis­it­ors — instead of try­ing to con­vert two young Pokémon Go players?

The FOMO Filter 

Don’t get me wrong:

A part of me cel­eb­rates the office sup­pli­er for tak­ing a chance to try some­thing new. “Fortune favours the bold.”

Still, some­thing must be said about tak­ing unne­ces­sary gambles when there’s plenty of oth­er low-hanging fruit. Marketing and com­mu­nic­a­tions are fiercely com­pet­it­ive simply because we com­pete for one of the world’s rare and most valu­able nat­ur­al resources; people’s attention. 

How to keep up with online trends - Marketoonist
By Marketoonist.

The ques­tion we should be ask­ing ourselves:

The FOMO fil­ter: Before exper­i­ment­ing with excit­ing online trends, ask your­self: have you exhausted all exist­ing PR- and mar­ket­ing opportunities?

Stay Focused, Stay Sharp

Businesses can’t afford to jump on every online band­wag­on (Clubhouse, any­one? Or per­haps — the Metaverse?) that seems to be in vogue. 

It turns us into fomo-suf­fer­ing neo­phili­acs. We fall prey to our strategies of man­u­fac­tur­ing arti­fi­cial scarcity.

The office sup­ply store’s mar­ket­ing team should be excited about inbound mar­ket­ing, Google AdWords, cus­tom­er loy­alty, mar­ket research, online con­ver­sion, search engine optim­isa­tion, and e‑commerce. Instead of Pokémon Go.

So, Anne and every­one else strug­gling to keep up, you don’t have to catch them all! 

Just. Stay. Business. Relevant.


Please sup­port my blog by shar­ing it with oth­er PR- and com­mu­nic­a­tion pro­fes­sion­als. For ques­tions or PR sup­port, con­tact me via jerry@​spinfactory.​com.

Update: Since someone asked:

Pokemon Go - DoctorSpinPR - Sirfetchd
I roll with Team Instinct.
ANNOTATIONS
ANNOTATIONS
1 Worchel, S., Lee, J., & Adewole, A. (1975). Effects of sup­ply and demand on rat­ings of object value. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32(5), 906 – 914.
2 The beha­viour is some­times called FOMO (fear of miss­ing out).
3 A Pokestop is a vir­tu­al in-game fea­ture of the pop­u­lar mobile game Pokémon Go, a game that blends with real-world locations.
4 Again, for those not up to speed with all things Niantic, a lure is a vir­tu­al item and part of the game. By pla­cing your lure at a Pokestop, you attract vir­tu­al creatures for oth­er play­ers to catch. But I assure you that most busi­nesses can thrive without this spe­cif­ic knowledge.
Jerry Silfwer
Jerry Silfwerhttps://doctorspin.net/
Jerry Silfwer, alias Doctor Spin, is an awarded senior adviser specialising in public relations and digital strategy. Currently CEO at KIX Index and Spin Factory. Before that, he worked at Kaufmann, Whispr Group, Springtime PR, and Spotlight PR. Based in Stockholm, Sweden.

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