Wordle: A classic case of scarcity marketing
It’s the limited playing time that makes people come back for more…
Wordle has taken the internet by storm using an old marketing strategy.
The premise of the unpretentious game are as follows: you have to guess a series of 5-letter words, and are given six attempts. Green hints are correct letters at the right spot, orange hints are correct letters at the wrong spot, while grey hints are letters not in any spot.
Simple isn’t it?
The big difference with similar online word/puzzle games is you can only play Wordle once every 24 hours. That’s scarcity marketing at its finest (increasing the value of a product by reducing its supply).
Since Wordle’s inception in October 2021, millions of users have been fiending…waiting their turn to guess the next word. This has prompted creator Josh Wardle to sell the game to The New York Times Company for an undisclosed seven-figure amount (which has since monetized Wordle on its digital platform).
This was a simple, yet well-executed masterplan.
This story was first published on The PhilaVerse (my Substack newsletter).
