BRANDING

All The Cool Kids Aren’t Doing Black Friday

Between sky-high unemployment numbers and social distancing, I’m not sure any of us expected this Black Friday to be a normal one. 

While an abnormal shopping holiday might sound like just another stressful pivot for marketers, some are leaning into it by launching anti-Black Friday campaigns. These brands aren’t the first to have this idea, but 2020 may have created conditions uniquely suited to a successful campaign of this sort.  

Bear-ly any purchases

Sustainable DTC weighted blanket brand Bearaby is doing the opposite of a Black Friday sale this year. 

To continue the brand’s mission of encouraging more mindful purchasing decisions among consumers, Bearaby will launch a Black Friday blanket that customers have to “sleep on” before checking out. You actually can’t buy the Black Friday blanket on Black Friday. 

• Bearaby is also putting “joyful interruptions” on its site. Examples include error pages, pop-up questionnaires about your purchasing motives, and polite reminders to take a pause before clicking purchase. 

Technicalities: There’s no paid spend behind the campaign. Bearaby is instead running it through owned channels like email and an experiential website—which turns black as soon as the customer pushes “add to cart.”

The Bear doesn’t stand alone: 

• Sprout Kids leaned into mental health awareness as the messaging behind its anti-Black Friday campaign this year in a long-form video spot. 
• Sustainable clothing brand Alohas told customers and Black Friday itself that “it’s over,” in the name of fair purchasing practices.  

+1: Some brands are taking more moderate, if still critical, stances on Black Friday this year. Both Everlane and Shopify announced initiatives to mitigate the environmental impact of the pseudo-holiday, for instance.

Is “Say No to Black Friday” just a 2020 thing?

For smaller brands, doing away with Black Friday sales could make it easier to grow long term brand identity. 

• “The more brands that end [the] sale season, the stronger brands will be throughout the year,” Elizabeth Tamkin, former market editor at Repeller, told Marketing Brew. “Sales weaken brands and train customers to wait until discounts. That makes it really hard for small brands to grow organically.”

Beyond avoiding brand dilution, an anti-Black Friday campaign could help create a more authentic consumer connection. 

“There is obviously a risk of hurting short-run revenues, but we believe there is an even bigger opportunity to build a new type of customer relationship where consumers can trust the brand in taking their best interests into account,” Bearaby Founder and CEO Kathrin Hamm told Marketing Brew.

Portable lessons

Although 2020’s Black Friday has come and gone, there are still lessons to be learned from brands that just said no this year. 

• Doing something unexpected for a major “holiday” like Black Friday is a great opportunity to assert brand values. 
• Saying something different and unique to your brand will likely make more of an impact than shouting “sale!” AWOLNATION-style into your audience’s ears just like every other brand. 

It’s the micro-holiday marketing principle at work: Acknowledge an event to give you reach, but work your core values and story into that acknowledgement to truly cement who you are to consumers.

SPONSORED BY BRIGHTCOVE

We Virtually Forgot We Were at a Virtual Event

This whole time we were working on our vinyasa flow in our living room, we could have sworn we were actually at our favorite yoga studio with a room full of fellow yogis om-ing away. But that was just the video power of Brightcove. 

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See how you can turn your virtual event into the event with Brightcove. 

FROM THE CREW

Your Winter Reading List

Settle into your couch—in a cozy way, not a WFH way, it’s the holidays y’all—and pick out one of these (reader suggested!) marketing books to sit by a fire with. 

• Hooked by Nir Eyal
• Obsessed by Emily Heyward
• The Practice by Seth Godin
• Marketing Outrageously Redux by Jon Spoelstra
• Get to Aha! by Andy Cunningham
• Performance Partnerships by Robert Glazer
• Ponderings of a PPC Professional by Kirk Williams 

Phoebe’s pick: I just finished Junior by Thomas Kemeny, care of Matthew Kobach, and loved every page.

SPONSORED BY EMARKETER

Boom or bust? Discover which U.S. digital forecasts got a surprise boost and which saw unexpected declines. Learn how Covid-19 created permanent long-term trends and temporary distortions. Read eMarketer by Insider Intelligence’s complimentary analyst report, “2020’s Biggest U.S. Forecasting Shocks: A Year of Recalculations Brought About by Covid-19.” Download now.

FRENCH PRESS

Marketing tips to make you fancy

Emails: Ten months in, here's how one writer suggests you alter your email marketing strategy for the pandemic era. 

CMOs: Catch up on all the CMO Series interviews you missed while trying to explain what programmatic marketing is to your oldest family member over a Thanksgiving Zoom. 

LinkedIn: Here are exactly 39 LinkedIn video tips to boost your marketing strategy on the platform. 

Tools: It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s five smart tools for 2021’s digital marketing landscape.

AD ANTIQUES

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I'm never referring to the balloons at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade as anything other than "these big gas-bags" from now on, thanks to this 1948 Goodyear ad. 

ICYMI

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• A post-2020 guide to getting hired in the marketing industry
• Mystery is afoot at Pinterest
• Why infomercials are still a thing in 2020