How to plan Q4 for a premium eCommerce brand (without discounting your profit away)

I got a Black Friday early access email last week. Not November. Not even late October. The middle of September.

Ten weeks out. Early access to an event so far away it hasn’t got a date in anyone’s head yet, from a brand that clearly had nothing else to say and reached for the only lever it knows.

If your Black Friday early access starts in September, it isn’t early access. It’s just a very long sale.

A couple of weeks ago I put early access on the list of seven reasons to buy that aren’t a discount, so let me clear up the difference, because two completely different things are going around under the same name.

Early access to something new costs you nothing. The product exists, the price is the price, and what your best customers get is first pick. That’s status. Status is free.

Early access to a sale is a different beast. Whatever discount sits underneath it costs you exactly what it always costs you. All you’ve done by opening early is widen the window you’re paying for. You give the margin away for three weeks instead of four days, mostly to people who were coming anyway.

There is a theory behind it, in fairness. Consumer spending over the quarter is a fixed pot, so if you get to the wallet first, you capture your share before everyone else piles in. The brands who wait until the event itself are left with the dregs.

It’s not even a new idea. This date creep has been going on for years. Last year the early access emails landed in October. This year, September. At this rate we’ll be doing Black Friday in the Easter holidays.

Does it work? A bit. Some people buy. There’s always someone who was already hovering and just needed a shove.

But look at who you’re shoving, and what it costs. You’re pulling forward sales you had coming, and paying a discount for the privilege. And you’re doing it to customers who know perfectly well that the best offers turn up during the main event, so there’s no real urgency in it for them either.

Which is the problem we talked about a couple of weeks ago, wearing a party hat. When your brand is always somewhere in a discount cycle, your customers stop watching your calendar altogether. They buy when they need the thing, at whatever the going rate is that week, because they’ve worked out there’s always a going rate. The urgency is gone, and you’re the one who took it away.

It’s Coles and Woolworths putting hot cross buns on the shelf on Boxing Day. Nobody’s Easter got earlier. The buns just sit there for three months, getting less special.

That’s the actual cost of date creep. Not that it fails, because it doesn’t entirely. It’s that every year the event means a little less, and the thing you’re relying on to carry your year quietly gets weaker.

So let’s talk about what you plan instead, between now and the end of January.

Ezra Firestone’s team put out their Q4 planning guide a few weeks ago, and I suspect a few of you have downloaded it. I’ve read it properly, and I want to say something about it, because I found it genuinely surprising.

I’ve been reading his material for years. The through-line has always been revenue. Bigger event, bigger list, bigger number. This year’s guide is not that. It tells you to stop escalating discount depth, says depth alone didn’t earn its margin anywhere they looked, and sets your acquisition spend from contribution margin rather than a blended return target nobody validated.

I don’t recall ever hearing him talk about contribution margin before. It’s the most anti-discount thing I’ve seen from that part of the industry, and it lands more or less exactly where we’ve been arguing all year on this show. When someone with that much visibility across that many accounts shifts position, it’s worth noticing. It means the discount treadmill isn’t just a premium-brand grumble any more. The numbers are making the case on their own.

His guide is written for high-volume, mass-market DTC brands, where the promotional calendar genuinely is the main event, and it’s good at that job. What I want to give you is the version for premium brands, which is a different animal in a few important ways.

Six things. Here’s the first.

Your margin sets your spend. Not your revenue target, not a return-on-ad-spend number someone handed you in 2021, and not what you spent last November. Your contribution margin.

Gross margin and contribution margin get used interchangeably and they’re not the same thing, which is where a lot of Q4 plans quietly fall over. Gross margin is like looking at your salary. Contribution margin is like looking at your salary after the mortgage, the school fees, the insurance and the four streaming services you’ve forgotten you’re paying for. One of those numbers tells you what you can actually spend on a Saturday. The other one just makes you feel good on payday.

So: your selling price, less the cost of the product, less everything else that only happens because that order happened. Pick and pack. Shipping, including the free shipping you’re generously absorbing. Payment processing. Your returns rate. The gift box, if you’re doing gift boxes.

What’s left is what you have available to buy a customer and still be in front. That’s your ceiling, and once you know it, most of your Q4 decisions make themselves. Whether you can afford to buy customers in the most expensive fortnight of the year or whether that money works harder in October and January. How deep a discount you can carry before you’re paying people to take your stock. Whether free shipping is a nice gesture or a slow leak.

This isn’t a Black Friday rule. It’s the rule. It applies in March, it applies in July, and it should be setting your spend every month of the year.

Black Friday doesn’t introduce a new principle. It just takes away your margin for error. Anyone who’s advertised online for more than a year knows what happens to ad costs across that fortnight. It’s airfares to Bali in the school holidays. Same plane, same seat, twice the price, and everyone else had the same idea.

The question was never whether ads get dearer. It’s whether your offer and your margin can carry it. Do the contribution margin work and you can answer that in about four minutes. Skip it and you’ll find out in arrears, in December, when there’s nothing to be done.

Number two. Stop planning against the retail calendar and start planning against your own demand.

Here’s the exercise. Pull your revenue by week for your last two Q4s and put them side by side. By week, not by month, because a month will hide the very thing you’re looking for. Then find your actual peak.

For some of you it’ll be Black Friday week, and if that’s genuinely where your customers are, terrific, plan accordingly. Plenty of you will find something else. You’ll find your peak sitting in the first half of December, because you’re a gifting brand and people buy gifts when they start thinking about Christmas, not when a discount shows up. Or you’ll find it sitting after Christmas, because you sell a summer product in a summer country.

Most of the advice we read was written for the northern hemisphere, where Q4 is cold and dark and ends with everyone going indoors until March. Ours ends at the beach with a glass of something cold. School’s out, people are travelling, they’re having everyone over, and for the first time since January they’ve got a spare thought in their head.

If you sell sun care, swim, outdoor, entertaining, travel, anything with a summer in it, your season doesn’t finish on Black Friday. It’s barely started. Emptying your quarter’s budget into the most expensive fortnight of the year, three weeks before your real peak, isn’t a slightly suboptimal decision. It’s just a bad one.

We work with Babiators, the kids’ sunglasses brand, and they’re a lovely illustration. In America, kids’ sunglasses in December are a stocking filler. Here, they’re what a parent buys because the family’s off to the beach in a fortnight and the last pair went missing somewhere around the October long weekend. Same product, same month, completely different reason, completely different week.

Chart your own weeks. Two years of them. Then build the budget to fit your curve instead of somebody else’s.

Number three. Your customer’s quarter has about six moments in it, and a discount speaks to one.

She’ll shop Black Friday. Let’s not be precious about it. Premium customers are not immune to a good deal and there’s no prize for being the brand that stood on principle and sold nothing.

But price is not the main thing moving her, and if you build the whole quarter on the assumption that it is, you’ll spend a great deal of money talking to her in a language she doesn’t speak. What moves her is newness. The season she’s living in. The occasion that’s already in her diary.

Between now and February she goes through a series of those, and every one is a reason to buy that has nothing to do with a percentage.

There’s the turn of the season. It’s warming up. Wardrobes change, skin changes, routines change, and what she needed in July isn’t what she needs in November. If your product has any seasonal dimension, the weather is a stronger purchase trigger than anything you could knock off the price.

There’s party season, from late November to mid December, when her diary is a horror show of work functions, end-of-year drinks, the school thing and Christmas Day itself. She’s thinking about what she’ll wear, how she’ll look and what she’s turning up holding. If you sell anything in those three categories, that’s your window, and Black Friday has nothing to do with it.

There’s Christmas gifting, which for most premium brands is the real event of the quarter. Gifting is its own discipline, because the person buying often isn’t the person using. She’s anxious about getting it right. She wants it to look considered, arrive on time and not require her to make eleven decisions on a Tuesday night. Everything that takes the anxiety out is worth more to her than money off. Curation. A gift guide that actually guides. Packaging that does half the work for her. A delivery cut-off she can trust.

There’s the holiday itself. Travel, beach, everyone at her place, a fortnight out of routine where she finally has a minute to think about herself.

And there’s the new year. Back to school, which here is late January and is a genuine commercial moment for anyone selling to families. And the wellness reset, which is real, and which most brands sleep straight through because they’ve knocked themselves out in November.

Five or six distinct moments, each with a customer in a completely different frame of mind. A business built around “what’s our Black Friday offer” is speaking to one of them, for about four days, and then going quiet. It’s the bloke at the dinner party with one good story.

Number four is the one that gets skipped every single year, and then gets blamed on the ads.

Your campaign is not a banner.

What usually happens is this. The offer gets decided in a meeting. Someone puts a black bar across the existing hero image, adds “UP TO 40% OFF” in a font nobody chose deliberately, schedules five emails, and duplicates last year’s ad set with the new price in the headline. That’s the campaign. Then when it underperforms, the conversation is about the ad account.

It’s turning up to a wedding in your work clothes with a slightly nicer tie. Technically you’ve made an effort. Everyone can tell you haven’t.

A campaign is a story, told everywhere, for a fixed period. Which means content, built for the moment, and merchandised across everything.

Start with the idea. Not the discount, the idea. What is this campaign about? Summer’s here. The gifts you’d actually want to receive. The one thing to pack. Then make the content for it. Photography that looks like the season you’re selling into, not the shoot you did in autumn. Video that shows the product doing its job in the moment the customer is living in. A founder piece. A gift guide with an actual point of view instead of a list of your bestsellers.

Then merchandise it everywhere, and I mean everywhere. Homepage. Collection pages. Product pages. Navigation. Your emails. Your ads. Your organic social. Your packaging insert. If someone lands on you from a Pinterest pin in early December, they should hit the same story the ad is telling.

This is the bit that sits behind most “our ads stopped working” conversations. The ad didn’t stop working. The ad made a promise, the customer clicked, and landed on a page that looked like any other Tuesday with a sale sticker on it. It’s a shop with a fabulous window display and nothing rearranged inside.

It’s also why you plan Q4 in September rather than November. Creative takes time. You can decide a discount in a meeting. You cannot shoot a summer campaign in a meeting.

Number five. Participate in Black Friday on purpose.

Existing customers first. The people who’ve already paid you full price should never find out about your sale from an ad. That’s how a loyal customer ends up feeling like a mug.

Give something rather than take something off. A gift with purchase, a bundle, an upgrade, a sample of the thing you want her hooked on next. Something that increases what she gets instead of decreasing what you keep. If you’re choosing the gift, choose the one that takes her somewhere new in your range, not the one that clears the shelf you regret buying.

And if you run early access, run it like early access. Short. Days, not weeks. To your best customers, not everyone who ever gave you an email address in exchange for ten per cent off. First pick is a reward. An early discount is just a longer discount.

That’s the whole Black Friday section, deliberately, because how much airtime a thing gets should roughly match how much of your year it deserves.

Number six, and the one I care most about. Don’t stop your plan on Christmas Eve.

Nearly every Q4 plan I see, including some good ones, runs out of road around the twenty-fourth of December. The campaign ends, everyone goes on leave, and January happens by accident.

For a lot of Australian premium brands, that’s a waste, because January isn’t a hangover. It’s a genuine growth window. Your customer has time, she’s in a completely different headspace, she’s thinking about the year ahead, and nobody’s shouting at her, because every other brand in the country has gone quiet. You’ve got the pool to yourself.

Boxing Day is the trap. It’s our discount event, and the reflex is to run another sale three weeks after the last one. Think very hard about that. You’ve just spent November establishing what your brand is worth. Following it with a clearance is a quick way to explain that you didn’t mean it.

Plan January now, in September, while you still have a functioning brain. Because you will not be planning anything on the twenty-seventh of December. Nobody is.

That looks like a first launch of the year that’s ready to go. A welcome flow and a post-purchase flow that are genuinely good, so the crowd of new customers you picked up in November get a proper second conversation instead of landing straight into another discount email. Content that speaks to the new year version of your customer. And some budget held back deliberately, because January media is cheap and November media is not.

Money you don’t spend in the most expensive fortnight of the year is money you get to spend in one of the cheapest. That’s not caution. That’s just arithmetic.

So, the six.

Work out your contribution margin properly, including everything that varies with the order, because that’s the ceiling for the whole quarter.

Chart your last two Q4s by week and find where your peak actually sits, which in this country is very often later than you’ve been told.

Map your customer’s moments between now and February, and build a reason to buy for each one that isn’t a number with a percentage sign after it.

Build real content for each campaign and merchandise it across the entire site, not just a banner and five emails.

Participate in Black Friday deliberately. Existing customers first, value added rather than price removed, and early access that’s actually early access.

And plan January before you need it.

More work than picking a discount, I’ll grant you. But it’s the difference between a quarter you survive and a quarter that sets up your year.

And when someone forwards you a Black Friday early access email in September, you’ll be able to have a quiet laugh, and get back to the plan you’ve already built.

If you’d like expert eyes on your Q4, and help working out those numbers before you commit the budget, let’s have a chat. Book a Brand Growth Strategy Session with me at productpreneurmarketing.com.