It's September in Melbourne, and Sarah, CMO of a leading Australian homewares brand, stares at her calendar. Click Frenzy looms in November, followed by the relentless drumbeat of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the Christmas shopping frenzy. Her inbox is already flooding with discount strategies from her team, each proposal deeper than the last: 30% off, 50% off, buy-one-get-one-free.

But Sarah remembers last year's aftermath – the spike in sales followed by a dramatic slump in January, customers trained to wait for the next big sale, and margins so thin they barely covered the cost of acquisition. She knows there has to be a better way.

The question facing Sarah and CMOs across Australia isn't whether to participate in the peak retail season. It's how to compete without falling into the discount spiral that transforms distinctive brands into faceless commodities.

The Discount Spiral: A Race to the Bottom

Picture the typical Black Friday scene: a digital battlefield where every brand screams louder with bigger discounts, bolder fonts, and more urgent countdown timers. In this chaos, something insidious happens. Brands that once commanded premium prices find themselves competing solely on percentage points.

The risks are more severe than most marketers realise:

Margin Erosion Accelerates
When you compete purely on price, you're essentially auctioning off your profit margins to the highest bidder – except in this auction, the highest bidder wins by going lowest. Each competitor's price cut forces another round of reductions, creating a deflationary spiral that can take years to escape.

Brand Devaluation Becomes Permanent
Heavy discounting doesn't just affect this season's margins – it fundamentally reshapes how consumers perceive your brand's value. Premium positioning, carefully built over years, can be undone in a single promotional period when customers begin to question why they ever paid full price.

Behavioural Conditioning Takes Hold
Perhaps most dangerous is the psychological conditioning that occurs. Consumers learn that patience is rewarded with discounts, training them to defer purchases and wait for the next sale. This creates a vicious cycle where brands must discount more frequently and more deeply to trigger purchase behaviour.

Post-Promotional Slumps Deepen
The January sales crash becomes more severe each year as brands struggle to maintain momentum without promotional support. Share gains evaporate quickly when they're not supported by genuine preference or brand loyalty.

Research from various retail studies suggests that in many categories, 60–80% of incremental sales from heavy discounting are simply brought-forward purchases rather than true category growth. This means brands are essentially borrowing from their future sales, often at dramatically reduced margins.

The Distinctiveness Solution: Standing Out in the Storm

While competitors slash prices and margins, distinctive brands have another weapon: memorable brand assets that cut through promotional noise and build lasting mental structures.

Think about the brands that thrive during peak season without resorting to the deepest discounts. They share common characteristics: instantly recognisable logos, distinctive colour palettes, memorable characters or spokespersons, and taglines that stick in consumers' minds long after the sale ends.

Distinctive Assets as Cognitive Shortcuts
In the overwhelming environment of Black Friday promotions, consumers rely on mental shortcuts to navigate choices. Distinctive brand assets – logos, colours, characters, taglines, sonic cues – serve as these shortcuts, allowing your brand to be recognised and recalled even in cluttered promotional environments.

Memory Structures That Persist
When promotional creative is built around distinctive assets, it doesn't just drive immediate sales – it strengthens the memory structures that will influence future purchase decisions. A discount banner featuring your brand's distinctive colours and familiar mascot creates neural pathways that extend far beyond the promotion period.

Differentiation in Digital Clutter
In crowded retail media and digital advertising channels, distinctiveness becomes the critical differentiator. Your 20% off promotion becomes memorable when it's unmistakably yours, while generic "SALE" messaging disappears into the promotional white noise.

Consider the difference between two discount banners: one featuring generic sale imagery with bold discount percentages, and another incorporating distinctive brand colours, recognisable typography, and a familiar brand character alongside the offer. The latter builds brand memory while driving sales; the former merely competes on price.

Strategic Playbook: September to November Action Plan

Smart CMOs use the lead-up months to build distinctive brand strength before the promotional battle begins. Here's how to prepare:

1. Audit Your Brand Assets Now

Before you can leverage distinctiveness, you need to understand what you're working with. Conduct a comprehensive brand asset salience check:

• Logo Recognition: Can consumers identify your logo in isolation?
• Colour Ownership: Do your brand colours immediately trigger association with your company?
• Tagline Recall: How many consumers can complete your tagline when given the first few words?
• Character/Mascot Recognition: If you have brand characters, are they strongly linked to your brand?

This audit reveals which assets are working hardest for your brand and which need strengthening before peak season.

2. Design "Distinctive First, Discount Second" Creative

Reverse the typical promotional creative hierarchy. Instead of leading with the discount percentage, lead with your strongest brand assets, making the brand unavoidable even when the specific offer isn't memorable.

Practical Application:

• Position your logo prominently and ensure it's visible even in thumbnail views
• Use your brand colours as the dominant palette, not just accent colours
• Integrate brand characters or symbols naturally into the promotional story
• Ensure your distinctive typography is maintained even in urgent promotional contexts

3. Anchor Promotions in Category Entry Points

Connect your sales messaging to the situations where consumers naturally think about your category. For Australian retailers preparing for summer season, this might include:

• BBQ and outdoor entertaining
• Holiday travel and leisure
• Christmas gifting occasions
• Back-to-school preparation (for the Southern Hemisphere)

By anchoring promotions in these category entry points (CEPs), you ensure your brand shows up in consumers' minds when mental availability is highest, not just when they're actively seeking discounts.

4. Use Early Promotions as Brand-Building Test Beds

September and October promotions become laboratories for testing what drives brand recognition. Experiment with different approaches to incorporating distinctive assets:

• Test asset-heavy creative against discount-focused alternatives
• Measure which approaches drive both immediate conversion and brand recall
• Refine your approach based on learnings before the high-stakes Black Friday period

5. Implement Measurement Beyond ROAS

Performance marketers excel at measuring immediate return on ad spend, but peak season success requires a broader measurement framework. Layer brand-building metrics onto your performance dashboards:

Brand Lift Indicators:

• Awareness changes during promotional periods
• Consideration shifts that persist post-promotion
• Asset attribution improvements

Long-term Health Metrics:

• Brand salience in category entry point situations
• Price elasticity changes (reduced reliance on discounting)
• Share of mind metrics in your category

Measurement Framework: Metrics That Matter

To truly understand whether your distinctive approach is working, track these key indicators throughout the peak season:

Distinctive Asset Attribution

Measure the percentage of consumers who correctly link your key brand assets to your brand. Strong distinctive assets should show improvement in attribution even during heavy promotional periods.

Promotional-Period Brand Salience

Track the percentage of consumers who recall your brand when thinking about relevant occasions like "holiday gifts," "summer entertaining," or "year-end celebrations." This measures whether your promotions are building mental availability.

Consideration Stickiness

Perhaps most importantly, measure how well consideration share is retained after promotional periods end. Brands built on distinctiveness should show better retention of consideration compared to those competing primarily on price.

Price Elasticity Evolution

Monitor whether strong brand affinity is reducing your reliance on heavy discounts over time. Distinctive brands often find they can drive similar volume with smaller discount percentages.

The CFO Conversation: Making the Business Case

When defending brand-building budget allocation for Q2 planning, frame the choice clearly for financial stakeholders:

The Discount-Led Path:

• Immediate revenue spikes during promotional periods
• Rapid erosion of margins and brand equity
• Increasing dependence on deeper discounts to maintain volume
• Volatile performance tied to promotional intensity

The Distinctiveness-Led Path:

• Sustained brand salience that reduces promotional dependency
• Higher baseline preference supporting premium positioning
• More predictable performance driven by brand strength
• Stronger resistance to competitive promotional pressure

Position promotional investments as brand-building opportunities that happen to drive immediate sales, rather than pure performance marketing that erodes long-term value.

Consider how some of Australia's strongest brands navigate peak season. Brands like Bunnings don't compete primarily on having the lowest prices – they compete on being the most distinctive and memorable choice. Their promotional creative maintains strong brand assets while communicating value, building both immediate sales and long-term preference.

The lesson isn't to avoid promotions entirely, but to ensure promotional activity strengthens rather than weakens your distinctive brand assets.

Preparing for Peak Season Success

September marks a critical decision point for Australian CMOs. The brands that thrive during peak retail season – and emerge stronger in January – are those that use distinctiveness as their competitive moat.

While competitors engage in margin-eroding price wars, distinctive brands can maintain profitability, build lasting memory structures, and create customer relationships that extend far beyond any single promotional period.

The choice is stark: participate in the discount spiral and watch your brand become a commodity, or build distinctive strength that allows you to compete on more than just price.

Your next steps are clear:

1. Audit your distinctive assets before promotional planning begins
2. Redesign promotional creative to lead with brand distinctiveness
3. Test and refine your approach during smaller promotional windows
4. Implement measurement that captures both performance and brand-building outcomes
5. Use learnings to build a sustainable competitive advantage

The brands that master this balance won't just survive peak season – they'll use it as a platform for long-term growth.

Ready to stress-test your brand's distinctive assets before peak season begins? The strongest brands use September and October to build the foundation for Black Friday success. Don't wait until November to discover whether your brand assets are strong enough to cut through the promotional noise.