Everyone knows the wizard of Oz as a fraud (and admittedly a bit of a weirdo). Small man in a big booth with lots of levers to pull and smoke to fart out.
But he had one thing going for him: he wasn’t selling powers, he was selling confidence.
So is that the job for marketing and ecommerce teams this Black Friday? Are we all just the weird guy working the smoke machine for 5 weeks straight?
Short answer: yes. Long answer came out of our latest session with Dr. Robert Bates, who spent 20 years on the data side of retail across Waitrose and Currys, and is now on the vendor side doing pricing intelligence at alentr.
His argument: in peak season you can’t control all prices. You control what you put in front of people and how confident you make them.
So…green-tinted spectacles on.
Picking the trinkets
The wizard doesn’t hand out the same thing to everyone. The lion gets a medal, the scarecrow a diploma, the tin man a clock that ticks like a heart. Each one is picked for the person standing in front of him.
That’s your job this Black Friday season. You have a bag of things you’re allowed to hand people and your task is deciding which ones go out and to whom.
Robert’s team gave the sorting job a name:
“Which are those A-list sales, which are those Z-list ones. Or to put it another way, which are the Kim K’s, which are the Megan M’s? Or if you’re a fan of Welcome to Wrexham, which are Ryan, which are Rob?”
There are four things to check, and in his words, mostly common sense rather than data science:
Price attractiveness: is this genuinely the lowest the product has been in 3 or 6 months? Is it in the bottom 10% of what customers have actually paid for it?
The competitor floor: your rivals are doing this same exercise right now. So look at the cheapest that competitor has managed to sell at in the last quarter. That tells you how low they can go if they want to.
Volume potential: you are about to put this stuff in front of your entire database, so it has to be something a lot of people already want. The quick check: take the buyer’s forecast for the deal and compare it to what your bestselling product does in a normal week. If your usual number one shifts a thousand units and this is forecast at a thousand, demand is real and the headline will land.
Availability: is it actually on the shelf and on enough shelves? Stocked in 250 stores out of 300, fine. Stocked in 30 and you’re about to send an email blast that will disappoint a lot of folks.
Then the BFCM campaign starts and the plan dies
When the curtain finally gets yanked back, the wizard’s contingency plan is to climb into a hot air balloon and drift off into the distance. Slightly dramatic, but you have better options.
And the plan will come apart, that part isn’t in doubt. What marketing can do is stop making it worse. Dynamic feeds, real-time competitiveness checks, and the willingness to pull a product out of an email before it goes. If a competitor has dropped and your price hasn’t caught up yet, swap it for something equally competitive and move on. Same with stock.
“The moment the campaign started, everything changes. Your buyers have built up the list, they’ve got their plans, and then what happens? One of your competitors drops the price. And those buyers are suddenly left with: can we afford to match? Do we match?”
Robert’s framing is that CRM goes in with a strong lead and then plays mop-up (and mop-up is not an insult). Aggressively priced lines that aren’t moving get pushed back up the list, targeted at the segments most likely to bite. You help the commercial team clear stock and because the selling window is closing you get room for deeper discounts where it’s genuinely needed.
One caveat he keeps returning to:
“Be honest about your own tech stack as to what you can and can’t change in real time.”
Which is the difference between you and the wizard. He had no plan for the curtain moving, so his only move was the balloon. You can swap a trinket and not choose exile (or unpaid PTO).
Don’t give courage to the lion who’s already brave
Somebody in the chat made the reasonable objection that all of this just attracts price buyers. Robert’s answer reframed the whole thing:
“Everybody is a buyer in a market.”
When the market expands, you don’t only gain customers. You can lose your own, and a customer who transacts with someone else starts building affinity for that someone else. So promotional economics has two sides and most teams only run the first: what do I gain from this transaction versus what do I risk losing if they go and buy it elsewhere.
“Anytime a customer transacts with someone else, they will gain an affinity to that alternative retailer. So you have to think about how you’re defending against them.”
Which means the same offer should not carry the same message to everybody.
Take the price guarantee. Send it to a new customer and it reads as permission: buy today, you’re not going to feel stupid in 3 weeks. Send it to a customer who already trusts you and it reads as something else entirely, which is that shopping around is now pointless. If buying from you always means getting the lowest price, there is no reason to go and check.
“If I’ve got a list of customers who I believe are long-term loyal, who have a high likelihood to return, then maybe I don’t necessarily want to be pushing the pricing message the strongest.”
That’s the personalisation that actually pays, and it’s about tone before it’s about targeting. For your loyal, high-likelihood-to-return segment, show them you’re competitive and then lead with something that isn’t a number. Guaranteed delivery slots, first access, and the reassurance that they’re already getting your best price.
Trinkets that cost less than they look
The wizard’s real skill was giving things away that didn’t cost him much. Three examples:
Spend now, save in January: Argos used to give £5 or £10 off a post-Christmas shop in exchange for doing your Christmas shopping with them. It moves cost into a dead trading period and a meaningful chunk is never redeemed because people forget.
Make the channel the offer: In fashion, online returns are brutal compared to stores. So find customers who’ve shopped in-store, who live near one, and give them a store-only reason to come in. You save delivery, you save returns, you pick up ancillary spend, and the customer thinks they got something extra.
Put the margin control in the condition: Like Puma’s Halloween thing: 20% off if you turn up in costume. Everybody opens the email, almost nobody qualifies, and the handful who do might go viral in a lion suit. As Robert put it, the reason finance signs off a 20% headline is that the redemption rate is tiny.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain
Then it’s over and somebody asks how it went. You have 3 levels, depending on who’s asking:
Against the market: did you hold or grow share without overinvesting margin.
Against the plan: did each deal beat its baseline, hit forecast, hold price, or get quietly eroded by other discounts.
Against the channel: open rate then click-through then conversion, in that order, because they’re diagnostic in sequence.
But the reason to decide all of this in October is this:
“It’s a little bit like a car crash in slow motion. And at the end of it, you can interpret almost anything.”
Which is the most honest description of post-peak reporting I’ve heard. Every number can be arranged into a story after the fact, so the only protection is agreeing what you were trying to do, per segment, before November starts.
Back to the weird man behind the curtain
Back to the question. Yes, that’s the job, and no, it isn’t the fraud part.
Somebody has to work the machinery and the customer is not supposed to see the levers. Wizard’s sin was claiming powers he didn’t have and the moment the curtain moved, asbestos hit the fan.
So the whole lesson in a BFCM context is: you do not control the price, the competitor, the stock or the weather. You control which things you point at, whether they’re true, and what you promise alongside them.
Give people a reason to believe buying today isn’t a mistake, then honour it. Confidence is the cheapest thing in your bag, right up until the moment you break it, then it becomes the most expensive.
Dr. Robert Bates joined us live in marginmaxx to talk through all of this. Request a spot here >