The Scarcity Score
In collaboration with the Commerce team at Mashable, I conceptualized and executed the Scarcity Score project that developed a new proprietary metric to concretize the impact of the saturated narrative of electronics supply shortages that plagued the Q4 holiday shopping season in 2021.
See the feature article of the project on Mashable.
In surveying supply chain analysts, we were able to gauge an item's potential for scarcity as consumers wondered "what do backlogged shipping ports, understaffed warehouses and manufacturing plants actually mean for my AirPods, my PS5, my new laptop, come holiday time?"
The Scarcity Score
How was the score created? The Commerce team would suggest top selling products, both anticipated best-sellers and products with strong affiliate program signals, which were then included in a survey distributed to handpicked supply chain analysts from reputable firms.
The analyst scores were aggregated and weighted with stock signals from major online retailers with affiliate sales programs. The products were then assigned a Scarcity Score from 1 (in stock) to 10 (very scarce) on a very brand-appropriate scale from Mashable.
Impact
After the report was built, digital PR efforts promoted the score and secured earned media placements with consumer media outlets at local news affiliates across the country. The earned media impact is estimated to have reached approximately 1.5MM viewers, with an average domain authority score (DA, provided by Moz) of referring backlinks at 77 DA.
