Is Black Friday Still Worth the Work?

When Three Ships Beauty decided to run its first Black Friday sale, there wasn’t a lot of strategy behind it. It was late 2017, and co-founders Connie Lo, BCom’15, and Laura (Burget) Thompson had just launched the skincare brand out of Lo’s Toronto apartment. Lo looked at the calendar, realized it was nearing the end of November, and thought it might not be a bad idea to try a quick promo. Her hunch was right: “It led to a sales bump of maybe $5,000 or $10,000, which we were so proud of,” she recalls.

Nearly a decade later, the one-two punch of Black Friday and Cyber Monday—commonly lumped together as “BFCM” in the industry—requires far more thought and muscle for Three Ships, now a booming multi-million-dollar brand with dozens of employees. Planning starts in the spring and by September it’s an all-hands-on-deck affair. “It’s a full team effort. We need to consider not only what other retail offers will be running at the same time, but also how our offers will run alongside each other,” Lo says. “The question isn’t whether we’ll offer a promotion, but how early and with what offer.”

Indeed, as is the case for any competitive brand in 2025, opting out isn’t an option. With a few rare exceptions, most modern consumer-facing brands will end November with BFCM promos,promising a broad range of perks, incentives and, overwhelmingly, deals. (The average Black Friday discount rate offered by retailers in 2024 was 26 per cent.)

For decades, brands have treated the BFCM weekend as a blessing meant to tip the ledger into profitability and kick off the (usually lucrative) holiday season. But the retail landscape of today is very different than the one that made Black Friday a phenomenon. As online shopping has expanded the playing field, consumers have grown less loyal to brands, more price-aware, and increasingly expectant of bigger and better deals pretty much all of the time. Customer acquisition costs are also rising at precisely the wrong time, as businesses contend with operational constraints caused by labour shortages, inflation and supply issues. No matter how you slice it, Black Friday is a more involved and complex equation than it once was. 

The evolution of Black Friday

The concept of Black Friday dates back to the waning days of the Depression, when retailers started pushing for ways to stimulate holiday shopping, but it really started to take off as an anchor consumer event in the 1980s. By the turn of the Millennium, scenes of turkey-fuelled mobs rushing store doors for cheap goods became a late-November staple. 

For retailers and brands, Black Friday proved to be a very powerful lever. “It’s always been about kicking off a massive consumption season, in which people do a huge amount of shopping and spend a huge amount of money,” explains Tandy Thomas, associate professor and E. Marie Shantz Fellow of Marketing at Smith, whose work examines how and why people buy what they do. “Black Friday gives brands a little bit of influence on how that plays out. They can nudge consumers to shop earlier, and to shop for the things that they want them to buy." 

The right deals, backed by the right promotional muscle, also became a means to attract new and lapsed customers. “It’s a way to attract a lot of different kinds of people into the stores,” Thomas says. “For consumers, this can be a very intense shopping experience. They get to feel that they’re getting a deal, that they’re winning, that they’ve outsmarted the system.”

Until about two decades ago, Black Friday sales took place mostly on a single day or two, mostly at bricks-and-mortar stores, and mostly in the U.S. But the internet—specifically, the introduction and massive expansion of ecommerce, chased by the compounding influence of social media—made it a global cultural phenomenon. As people gained the ability to buy anything, from anywhere, the power dynamic began to shift in favour of an increasingly informed and empowered consumer base.

Today, shoppers searching for Black Friday deals can find the best price, with the most favourable terms, in less time than you can say “ChatGPT.” (A recent KPMG report found that 15 per cent of Black Friday deal-seekers plan to use chatbots to optimise their BFCM hunts; among 25- to 34-year-olds, the number is 30 per cent.) “Customers today are able to be much smarter,” says Dave Rodgerson, EMBA’00, a veteran retail executive who spent decades working in consumer experience and technology for such organizations as Sears, HBC, IBM and Microsoft. “They are doing their research. And they don’t even think about whether they’re buying from a store or a website. It’s all about convenience.”

Participation has become table stakes for brands, which now find themselves competing for the attention of hyper-knowledgeable customers at the same time as everyone else. In search of new and novel ways to break through, many are starting earlier. “Black Friday is no longer just a day or a weekend,” Rodgerson explains. “It’s really a whole month of promotion.”

The gradual scope creep of the sale season has created its own issues, according to Yulia Nevskaya, assistant professor of marketing at Smith, whose research probes how consumers respond to purchasing and consumption prompts. “Because Black Friday promotions used to be very limited in time, they felt exclusive and memorable to consumers, and the deals felt earned,” she explains. “When they’re spread over weeks, if not months, it takes away urgency and starts to erode understanding of the baseline pricing. People start to think ‘Oh, if the brand can offer this price for a long time, there’s no need for me to ever pay full.’”

At Three Ships, Lo is very familiar with the challenge of timing. This year, after a good deal of thought, the brand opted to launch its BFCM promo more than two weeks ahead of Black Friday. “It’s become increasingly competitive to capture customers’ share of wallet,” Lo says. “Customers know that all brands run steep discounts in November, but if you wait until later in the month to start the sale, many customers will have already spent their budgets.”

Brands aren’t the only ones expending more effort around Black Friday. Shoppers are feeling the pressure too. More than half of consumers say they are finding holiday shopping stressful, and 76 per cent say they feel overwhelmed by the volume of purchase options before them. Volatile economic conditions aren’t helping: According to a PwC forecast, 84 per cent of consumers plan to cut spending over the next six months. “Black Friday used to feel a lot more fun,” Nevskaya says, pointing to the experiential thrill of leaving a store having nabbed an unreal deal. “For a lot of consumers, it now feels like work.”

The value of Black Friday today

None of this is to suggest that BFCM is not still a massive driver of retail activity: It remains the biggest shopping weekend of the year for both in-store and online sales. But experts say the value proposition has changed. 

Black Friday is no longer something brands can count on to help the short-term bottom line. It may still be the day that nudges some firms into profitability for the year, but the competitive context means that more and more treat it as a break-even effort, if not a loss leader. “In an environment like this, it’s not going to be the cash register where brands see the big wins,” Rodgerson says.

Nor is it realistic for companies to expect all new buyers lured by a 50 per cent discount to become regular customers. “There has to be a recognition that this is a time of year where there may be a lower conversion rate into loyalty than you’d expect otherwise,” Thomas explains. “Some people wait all year for Black Friday. They are only going to shop then, and only for what they need, and you won’t see them again for another year.”

But companies that manage to cut through the clutter can still use the consumer frenzy of Black Friday to drive results in the longer term, experts say. “Black Friday creates an opportunity for consumers to be thinking about your brand and, in turn, to build some positive associations with it,” Nevskaya says. “It creates an opportunity to differentiate by moving away from purely competing on price.”

Small details can make a big difference in building consumer goodwill. A smooth, clear and—wherever possible—delightful purchasing experience can make a transactional buyer think about coming back. Quick, judicious follow-ups can notch up basket values. Acts of altruism—like, for example, allocating a percentage of BFCM sales to a charity aligned with the brand’s values, or planting a tree for every transaction—can burnish brand perception and entice buyers looking to use their purchasing power as thoughtfully as possible. It’s a more patient approach, Rodgerson explains, but it can cultivate interest long after the holiday decorations have come down.

“In an environment in which customers are much more intelligent, credibility is the new currency,” he says. “When people find a retailer who gets behind something that they support, they’ll grow more familiar, more engaged, and more loyal. Creating that can be far more powerful, and far less expensive, than taking a deep price cut on a big-screen TV.”