First, in July, remember that there are only 150 days until Black Friday, and have a complete panic attack. One for the ages. Total breakdown in front of your family. Start screaming in a grocery store. Get kicked out of the bus. Only then may you schedule your first meeting.
Start early. No, earlier. Call it Black November. First sale happens before Halloween. Black Labor Day. Black Arbor Day. Do not tell people that the actual sale is Black Friday. Call everything “early Black Friday.” Do not listen when they get mad at you for discounting further.
At some point, you snap and drive five hours to a state park. It is Wednesday and nobody is there. You hike a trail alone with 1,000’ of vertical gain, get to the top, and sit on a rock. The view is spectacular; the only sound comes from an occasional gust of wind. You immediately remember a great copy idea for your Black Friday campaign, get your phone out, and write it down.
Email often. 15-part drip campaign. You are Hobonichi with the slow monthlong hypebeast reveal. Black Friday as drop. Release everything. Throw away everything anyone ever thought about you. You are a new store. You start calling your store a brand for some reason.
You wake up at 3am after anxiety-dreaming about your Instagram ad dashboard, and hire an “ads guy” and fire your “marketing director.” In time, you will come to recognize both of these decisions as bad ideas, but neither of those realizations will come before Black Friday. Black Friday is not for realizations, after all. It is for two things: selling, and shopping.
Copy idea successfully tested, you start to recognize the untouched wilds of nature as ROI-profitable, and you drive to another state park. This time you go on a weekend, and it is packed. Something inside of you twinges; you were not expecting the crowds, the noise, the constant stopping for photos, the bad trail etiquette. You don’t get any new copy ideas, but you do experience some great views, and you leave disappointed & drained.
In the meantime, there are more Black Friday meetings, and nobody can agree on what to “do” for it, even though the only thing your customers care about is deals, because the whole ding dang point of Black Friday is to charge less for the things you sell, and then tell people about it. In a world where materially every single retailer is doing this, all consumers will even do in response is scan the places they want to check out, look at what the discount is, and cop.
So “do” is not it. You know what must be “done.” It is two things:
- Charge less.
- Tell people about it.
Do it for a long time or a short time. Do it for 10% or 30%. Or don’t do it at all and make that part of your brand.
I guess there are other things. Make sure the store doesn’t break. Don’t roll out fixes. Just charge less and then tell people about it.
Oh, sure, “tell people about it” involves ad spend and email campaigns and all the other things. But it’s really an 80/20 sort of thing, right? Tell people enough. Don’t break yourself. And maybe touch grass? It’s warm in November these days, why not.