Brands constantly speak of innovation. They celebrate transformation, responsibility, customer-centricity, and long-term value. Yet every November, many return to one of the oldest commercial reflexes: the mass-discount ritual known as Black Friday.
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A practice wrapped in modern packaging, but rooted in a logic from another era.
A practice that once emerged from chaos, not strategy.
Its origin says everything.
In the 1950s and 60s, police officers in Philadelphia used the term “Black Friday” to describe the disorder that followed Thanksgiving. Streets flooded with shoppers, traffic jammed for hours, shoplifting spiked, and the entire city strained under the weight of a ritual it had not planned for. The name stuck, not because it represented prosperity, but because it represented chaos.
And somehow, decades later, an event born from dysfunction evolved into a global celebration of consumption.
Brands have updated their branding. But not their behavior.
The Culture Of Discounts: A Hidden Erosion of Value
Discounts are justified with familiar arguments: customers expect deals, visibility increases, volume compensates for margins, and competition forces participation.
But behind this logic lies a deeper issue: a culture of discounting that shapes expectations and erodes long-term brand value.
Heavy promotions train customers to delay purchases. They shift attention from meaning to price. They standardize decisions. They devalue the symbolic and emotional layers of the brand. And they compress margins to a point where volume becomes a substitute for strategy.
For example, according to Shopify, merchants on its platform generated $11.5 billion in sales during the Black Friday / Cyber Monday weekend 2024. And if a 25% discount cuts a 52% margin down to 27%, the math becomes brutal: to keep the same profit, you must sell more than twice as many units. Volume becomes the only lever for survival.
This erosion is not only financial.
It is cultural.
The “Black Friday day” has expanded into a full week, and in many cases ten or even fourteen days, not only after Thanksgiving, but increasingly before it. This extended cycle exhausts teams, strains operations, and creates a rhythm that contradicts many brands’ stated commitments to well-being and sustainability. It may temporarily lift transactions, but it rarely strengthens loyalty. It generates movement, not memory.
And in brand building, memory is what drives value.
The problem is not the promotion.
The problem is the dependence on promotion.
When the primary market signal becomes price, the brand fades into the background.
Real Innovation Demands The Courage To Stop
Some companies have chosen a radically different path. In 2015, the outdoor retailer REI made a decision that defied every industry rule: the company closed all its stores on Black Friday, paid its employees for the day, and encouraged everyone, staff and customers, to spend time outdoors.
No flash sales.
No urgency triggers.
No frantic race to capture market share on that specific day.
That choice did not weaken the business.
It strengthened it.
This is the part we often forget:
Real innovation is not additive.
It is subtractive.
It removes the practices that dilute meaning, rather than reinventing campaigns to justify them.
The Paradox Of Individual Action
Yet even brands with the strongest convictions discover that exiting the cycle individually is nearly impossible without systemic change.
ASKET, the Swedish brand that has closed its website every Black Friday since 2015, faces frustrated customers who wish they could access deals, despite other customers praising the pause in marketing frenzy.
Patagonia’s “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign in 2011 saw sales increase by 30% after its launch—the anti-consumption message paradoxically became a consumption driver. The brand faced accusations of hypocrisy as it continued opening new stores while preaching restraint.
Smaller brands fear losing ground to competitors who offer discounts. The pressure is structural, not just strategic.
This reveals the deeper challenge: individual courage, while admirable, cannot overcome a market logic that rewards participation and punishes abstention. Change requires more than isolated decisions. It requires a collective reimagination of how value is created and communicated.
Creativity Should Not Only Serve Advertising. It Should Serve Decisions.
This is perhaps the real challenge.
We’ve trained ourselves to channel creativity into promotion… to attract, persuade, and amplify. Yet creativity is most powerful when it questions, reframes, and redesigns the practices we take for granted.
A brand becomes stronger when creativity shapes decisions, not just communications.
When creativity helps leaders resist mass-market currents that pull everyone toward the same tactics, regardless of identity.
When creativity is used to invent new behaviors, not just better visuals.
The brands that will lead the next decade will not be the ones with the most inventive Black Friday campaigns.
They will be the ones with the clarity to step out of the cycle and build value where it truly matters: perception, trust, conviction, coherence, and long-term impact — not just quarter-to-quarter numbers.
As a marketer, your job is to compete. Compete differently with The Blake Project.
A Call To Courage
Black Friday may work.
But working is not the same as building.
If a practice weakens margins, exhausts teams, and conditions consumers to value only the price, it deserves to be questioned, not repeated.
Innovation requires courage.
Brand building requires coherence.
And creativity, when used wisely, can help leaders design practices that elevate both the brand and society, instead of eroding them.
Autopilot is not a strategy.
And repeating an outdated ritual is not a sign of progress.
The future belongs to the brands with enough clarity and enough conviction to create value differently.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Martin Ducharme, Brand Strategist & Creative Thinker
At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define and articulate what makes them competitive at pivotal moments of change. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth, and Brand Education
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