Once a cultural phenomenon unique to North America, Black Friday has exploded across the globe in recent years, creating a monumental commercial milestone in the annual retail calendar.

And it’s all about the discount. Sales, reductions, money off. Why not just ‘give it away’ for free? And for months, brands have been honing their Black Friday strategies, eager to maximise sales in the face of a global cost-of-living crisis.

When the average person feels they’ve got less money in their pocket, how do we make a case for them to spend their hard-earned salary, particularly when there are so many other places they could spend it? Why should they spend it with you, on your products, with your brand?

An obvious tactic is to discount heavily. That’s not new or news. But where some  brands might once have offered 25% off, this year many will stretch to 30%, 40% or maybe even 90%+ to encourage customers to part with their cash. After all, when disposable income is under increased pressure, many consumers won’t just need the hard sell, but a heightened sense of ‘value for money’ to justify the expenditure. And they need to feel like they’ve got a great deal.

But it’s time to challenge this notion of deep discounting in order to make sales. If you say 15% or 20% off well, maybe you don’t have to say 30%.

And what does this tell us? That language matters. Having the technology behind a campaign that can optimise language in real time, in line with its performance, or that can personalise emails and push notifications to resonate with what people really care about, is a powerful weapon.

Technology has to perform well given that we’re living in an attention economy. And let’s be realistic: we’re all going to be spammed to high heaven with deals come Friday 29 November.

Which means we need to pay more attention than ever to brand language, because it’s going to determine whether or not a customer opens an email chockful of offers.

But what are the benefits to limiting discounts, aside from keeping Chief Financial Officers happy? Especially when it’s about driving that bottom line forward in challenging economic conditions.

Oftentimes, discounting heavily and discounting again to get customers to click and purchase will cheapen a brand’s value. In some instances, it can even deter them from engaging with a brand and paying full price outside of sale – or silly – season.

Afterall, customers are fickle – and who can blame them? They will migrate towards the greatest perceived value. They’ll do their research, they’ll draw comparisons, and they’ll wait for brands and retailers to make their move.

But the impulse to shop around will be minimised if a customer feels like a brand is speaking to them directly, if it understands them, “talking their language”, surfacing just the right product at the right time; “And wait – with 20% off too? It’s like they know me. I feel seen. And now I don’t have to spend an hour trawling the internet for what I want because it’s right in front of me.”

Suddenly, smaller discounts speak greater volumes.

Black Friday is the moment to start building customer loyalty, to think about what a brand says and how it articulates it, and how it can be executed effectively without discounting so heavily that margins are completely eroded. Erosion is a critical pillar in this process. Because heavy discounting can also erode brand affinity and, in some instances, desirability.

But this can’t be reduced to brands thinking only about how they engage customers during the Black Friday rush. For maximum impact, they need to think about how they engage consumers and the language that inspires them all year round. They need to be wooed long-term, to cultivate an actionable understanding of them, and to build the right to make the approach when Black Friday comes around. Oftentimes it’s about steering customers towards the habits that revolve around a brand; whether that’s opening the monthly newsletter or engaging with a new augmented reality app function.

How do brands speak to consumers en masse but with heightened relevance at peak periods in the retail calendar? And how do they make sure customers feel like a brand is speaking to them as an individual?

The secret is to deploy the right tools to help brands produce effective, brand compliant messaging that speaks a customer’s language – and that does so at scale.

This is where Jacquard comes in. By generating consistently higher engagement and responses from consumers, we can offer brands brand language they trust – for compliance and performance. And trust is more than important: it’s the gateway to automation. When AI is generating and calibrating 30,000 plus language variants from a single prompt, trust is integral. But when that technology proves itself, and proves that it can be trusted, it revolutionises a brand’s ability to cut-through with customers on an individual basis, without having to discount so heavily that margins become non-existent.

This year more than ever before, brands need to embrace trusted language automation in order to unlock maximum value at this mission critical time of year.