Black Friday doesn’t destroy brands

November has begun, and many brands are doing what they do every year: lowering prices to attract attention.

Sometimes it works, of course. The problem is that it also gets customers used to waiting. It teaches them when to buy, how much to pay, and whether it’s worth choosing that brand outside of the promotion.

Discounts aren’t inherently bad.

They can be useful and part of a good strategy. The problem arises when they become the main reason for buying.

Because if a brand only manages to be chosen based on price, it only takes another brand to lower its prices a little more for the customer to go.

That’s the difference between using discounts as a tool and becoming dependent on them.

At TOTEM Branding, we see this frequently: when a brand has worked well on its positioning, its value proposition, and its relationship with its customers, the discount is beneficial. When it hasn’t, the discount simply exposes what was missing.

If a brand hasn’t built trust, desire, differentiation, and a clear reason to choose it throughout the rest of the year, Black Friday isn’t going to solve that problem. Rather, it will expose it.

Black Friday doesn’t destroy brands.

What it does is reveal which brands had real value and which ones only had room to cut prices.