Black Friday Cyber Monday Marketing Strategy: Discounting Without Wrecking Your Brand

It really depends brand to brand and industry to industry. This goes back to the prisoner’s dilemma, where if your competitors are discounting and you’re not discounting, they’re gaining market share on you because of the price point. But if you’re trying to label yourself as more premium and take advantage of the market, or position yourself as more of a prestige brand, you don’t discount. You don’t see Balenciaga, you don’t see Chanel running discounts and promotions, because what ends up happening is you start training your customers to wait for those sales. I’ve had a couple clients that would be running experiments, and the weeks leading up to their big sale day, if you have a semiannual sale, if you have Black Friday Cyber Monday that you participate in, no one is going to buy those goods right before if they know the next day it’s going to go on sale. It would be like buying a TV the day before Black Friday. It’s like, just wait the day, see if the discount’s there, and then convert.

With televisions, electronics, all those pieces, Black Friday is essentially an industry wide phenomenon, so there’s no avoiding Black Friday Cyber Monday if you’re in the electronics space. Unless you’re Apple, in which case you never discount until maybe weeks before their next drop, but all the consumers know it’s because they’re coming out with new features and specs. Those are the kind of things where by training them with the discounts you are then making them wait and just pulling forward conversions that might have happened later, or you are grabbing the demand that was just kind of pushed together or slumped up right before a sale would occur. This goes back to the other analogy that I use: are you buying pasta or are you hiring a plumber? If you’re buying pasta, you’re going to stock up on Black Friday, you know, stock your cupboards, it doesn’t go bad very quickly, it’s totally fine to do that. But if you have a leak in your house and your basement’s flooding, you’re not going to wait for a discount to hire a plumber. Those two very different states, very different industries, and very different in terms of expiration and need states, is really that Black Friday Cyber Monday.

Now I’ve seen other brands, one of our brands really, really innovative, try to tap out that market before Black Friday Cyber Monday using their CRM, and they would say, “Hey, if you’re this VIP member or if you’re this tier, you get these deeper discounts across sitewide as opposed to very narrow products that we’re going to put on Black Friday Cyber Monday.” So if you’re in the market for anything in that category and you’re a loyal member of that brand, they make sure you do all your purchases before Black Friday or Cyber Monday happens, and I think that that was a really clever, really interesting way to engage your CRM audience, provide value to them, and pull forward all the conversions that might have happened on Black Friday Cyber Monday but now won’t because they made that purchase beforehand and then they’re now out of market. I think that’s a really clever play that I’ve seen some advertisers do for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

I think one of the interesting changes or pieces is the rapid fire of the deals. So first there has to be the pre-Black Friday, letting everyone know that for Black Friday and Cyber Monday you’re running deals so that they go to check out the site, otherwise you’re going through retailers, you’re part of a larger catalog, you might get lost in the noise unless things are specific there. So again that makes your customers wait, but letting them know that there is a sale coming, I think, is a helpful way to amplify.

Also, when you are running a sale, I found that branded search engine marketing is actually a pretty profitable, or pretty solid way, to switch out and have a little bit more dynamic relationships with your customers, and what I mean by that is your SEO, your search engine optimization, your organic listings, they don’t change quickly enough, while your paid ads that are at the top, you could change site links, you could have different landing pages, you can have these custom things that you switch out. It allows a lot more dynamic information to be displayed to people for a very short period of time. So I found that while I’m normally not the biggest fan of branded search in non-competitive markets for your brand name or your brand terms, I find that Black Friday Cyber Monday is definitely a time where you can invest in that, to have those unique landing pages and have those specific products highlighted in a way that’s associated with your brand, because a lot of volume gets driven on that day.

You have to pick a lane first: are you playing or are you not playing? And then if you are playing, then you have to say, how do I amplify the people that are in market and let them know if you’re going to purchase something, purchase it with us, and then when the deal does come, managing your budgets for a little bit more lower funnel activities, especially if you did the upper funnel activities beforehand to alert them, is really the plays or the strategies that I’ve seen really pan out on the Black Friday Cyber Monday investments.