With discounts galore, Black Friday has become one of the biggest consumer spending events of the year, and a key focus for marketers. We spoke to Sam Brough, brand lead at Tracksuit, about Black Friday shopping trends and what brands should do to avoid consumer fatigue.
What are the biggest trends in the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales period?
One of the biggest trends is that the ‘M’ in ‘Black Friday and Cyber Monday’ (BFCM) needs a rebrand. It’s no longer Cyber Monday, it’s Cyber Month. What used to be a sharp, high-impact weekend has stretched into a four-week hype cycle, with brands dropping ‘early access’ deals from the start of November. The result is a sales period that’s noisier, longer and far more competitive than ever before.
We’re also seeing deeper discounts and earlier starts as brands fight to stay visible, but this arms race comes at a cost. Discounting, large retail media investments and over-indexing on rational messaging are not exactly the recipe for long-term, sustainable brand building success. The strongest brands don’t let a single sales period dictate their strategy.
How can brands avoid consumer fatigue during the extended BFCM window?
Start by grounding your decisions in your actual brand maturity. If you’re still building awareness, broad reach matters, but if you’re established, you don’t need to blanket the internet for four weeks. You just need to show up with relevance for the people already primed to buy from you. That’s not just more effective, it protects your margins.
Your brand positioning and tone of voice should also be your ‘North Stars’. BFCM is not the moment to ‘break character’. If you’re down-to-earth, stay down-to-earth. If you’re premium, stay premium. Fatigue happens when brands abandon who they are for a short-term spike.
And finally, go where your customers naturally are. If TikTok, Meta or retail media drives your discovery, focus your firepower there. If your most engaged audience is in your email list, show up in their inbox with clarity, not panic. Spreading yourself thin across every possible channel isn’t strategic, it’s exhausting. For you and your customers.
Avoiding fatigue isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing the right things, grounded in who you are as a brand. That’s what keeps you memorable long after the discount noise fades.
What are the other brand risks associated with BFCM sales?
An old boss of mine used to say that sometimes the worst place to advertise a car is in a car magazine, because it’s so expected that people stop seeing it. BFCM can have the same effect. When every brand shows up in the same channels, with the same urgency, you stop standing out and start blending into the wallpaper.
One of the biggest risks is forgetting to run your own race. BFCM can be an opportunity to zag while everyone else zigs. Performance media costs often spike as brands pile into the same sales-led channels, but that’s also when the brand-led product suites across major platforms get undervalued. There’s real upside in buying premium, high-quality media when everyone else is distracted by short-term conversion tactics.
Brands that chase the same playbook as everyone else risk missing wonderful opportunities to build meaning, distinctiveness and memories in the minds of future buyers.
Does BFCM increase sales, or just cannibalise sales from other times of the year?
Any marketer can grow revenue during BFCM, but profitability is the real test of a healthy brand. Heavy discounting creates a hidden risk for businesses aiming for long-term, sustainable growth, not just short bursts of cash flow.
What BFCM often does is bring future sales forward. Most customers who purchase during these deals were likely to buy anyway, just at a later date and at full price. While this spikes short-term revenue, it’s typically followed by a lull as the existing demand has already been pulled forward.
That dip then raises board-level questions and pressures marketers into repeating the same discount cycle, creating dependency on promotions and diluting the brand, rather than building enduring demand.
Will brands start ‘opting out’ of BFCM as a point of difference?
Warren Buffett’s line: be fearful when others are greedy is a useful lens for brands during BFCM. Running your own race, rather than getting swept up in the discount FOMO, can create real upside and differentiation.
We’re already seeing brands take this path. Movements like Green Friday and Slowvember position themselves as values-led alternatives to heavy discounting. Homegrown brands such as Dust & Glow and Orba are leaning into these approaches, and globally, the momentum is building too. Veja was a standout last year with its ‘Repair Friday’ initiative, offering free sneaker repairs instead of slashing prices.
I expect we’ll see more brands opt out of traditional BFCM promotions in favour of ‘outside the box’ campaigns that align more closely with their values, their margins and the kind of customer relationships they want to build.
How does the cost of living crisis affect consumer attitudes towards BFCM?
The “lipstick index,” coined by Estée Lauder’s Leonard Lauder in the early 2000s recession, points to a long-standing trend: in tough economic periods, consumers shift toward affordable luxuries. Today, that shows up as smaller basket sizes, more frequent shopping trips and a reluctance to commit to in-the-moment, large, one-off purchases.
The cost of living crisis has amplified this behaviour. Consumers have become far more intentional. Impulse buying is less prevalent, and shoppers increasingly wait for major sales moments like BFCM to make their big-ticket purchases. They’re looking for genuine value, not manufactured hype.
Brands can’t rely on noise alone to drive conversion; consumers are scrutinising every purchase. The brands that win during BFCM are the ones that have built trust, clarity and perceived value long before the sales period begins.
What should brands do to balance short-term sales with long-term brand building during BFCM?
Stay true to your positioning, your pricing discipline and your audience. BFCM is loud, but the customer’s voice is often the quietest in the room and brands that don’t tune into it end up shouting into the void. The brands that go on to build era-defining businesses are the ones that can tune out the noise, hold their line and make decisions anchored in long-term customer value, not short-term hype.
Depending on the maturity of the business, a proven effective rule of thumb is for brands to be spending 60% of their marketing budget on brand building efforts and 40% on sales activations. The best marketers won’t let the hype of BFCM take them too far off course from this ratio.
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