Yes, it’s September. School is starting again and as everyone heads off the beach and back to normal everyday life, while brands are busy preparing for the holiday season.  It’s by far not an easy task, especially this year.

To understand this in context, it’s important to review some past years’ holiday season. It was (for many years) that brands would wait until Black Friday to promote their sales.  Then there would be a second offer for Cyber Monday 3 days later.  This was about 5 years ago.

Then retail started changing offering Black Friday sales on Thanksgiving and as time went on, before Thanksgiving.  Now, they basically start the Monday of Thanksgiving week.

E-tail now starts 2 weeks before Thanksgiving and many brands are scaling up the sale discounts as they get closer to Thanksgiving, so sales start a week and a half before Thanksgiving and then go non-stop from promotion A to B to C all through Christmas.  That’s just the brands.

Consumers are responding, somewhat. Data has suggested that consumers are more inclined to ‘wait for the deal’ and are not rushed to get their stuff before Christmas.  This makes expectations not to align with reality.

So what should a brand do:

1.       Continue to promote through the same schedule though add additional ‘deal’ days in between to capture those people who are ‘waiting for the deal’.

2.       The message should be something like ‘Get it before they’re gone for good’, or some sort of ‘time is of the essence’ so they grab the deal today.

3.       Discount schedules can be tested to see if that you don’t have to give away everything to make a sale on December 20th. if the deal is the best it’s been and it’s not going to get better, you’ll capture that customer that wants it.

These are some of the few suggestions we would give though specifics ones for your business depends on your brand and how consumers engage with your brand.

What we also urge is that your approach can be modified to capture more consumers looking for your products. our research has shown many times over that brands try to squeeze as much as they can from their existing customers but do a very poor job of getting new customers to convert.

This is a ‘ticking time bomb’ for many brands and they know it. We came up with our e-book that let’s brands capture more of their product demand profitably. We hope you enjoy it.