That Fake Black Friday Deal: A Warning Shot for B2B Brands?
As Black Friday approaches, we're seeing more brands offering huge discounts with a suspiciously similar story: "Oops, we meant to make it 10%, but we accidentally typed 50%. Our mistake is your gain!"
Perhaps some have made a genuine error, but I suspect most are using some rather clever behavioural psychology. Take the example of a D2C car wash brand that claimed it had accidentally posted access to an exclusive friends-and-family discount. In the human brain (which, remember, is more of a storytelling engine than a logic processor), a discount becomes more valuable if it feels like it wasn’t meant for us. We're not just getting 15% off, we’re getting access.
Put simply, the discount becomes less about saving money and more about the thrill of not missing out. To the rational mind, a 15% discount is a nice-to-have. But add that little narrative - “you weren’t supposed to see this” – and to the emotional brain, it’s a fleeting chance to break the rules, beat the system, and acquire something under the illusion of insider access.
All very clever. But if a brand claims it has accidentally offered a discount it didn't mean to, there is a lie at the heart of everything that follows. And this can be a serious problem.
Let’s look at a wellness brand that is currently claiming it accidentally offered a 50% discount instead of 10% but will "still honour it." This is a brand whose entire positioning is built on trust and putting the consumer’s health first. Their marketing is based on exposing the hidden unhealthiness in everyday foods, building enormous credibility that extends to their own excellent products. By adopting a marketing tactic with a lie at its heart, have they endangered this trust? That will be for the consumer to decide, but my raspberry and lemon immunity drink tasted a little bitter this morning.
So, what does a questionable D2C discount have to do with the world of B2B? Everything. That slightly bitter taste left by the wellness brand is a micro-version of the catastrophic brand damage that occurs when a B2B relationship starts with a hint of inauthenticity. In B2C, a broken promise might lose you a £30 sale. In B2B, where you're asking for a £300,000 investment and a five-year partnership, that same whiff of insincerity doesn't just lose you a sale; it poisons the well for your entire market.
B2B is almost never about a single transaction. It's about building a cathedral, not selling bricks. The buyer isn't just purchasing a product or service; they are buying into your expertise, your future reliability, and your company's very character. They are staking their own career and reputation, in part, on your ability to deliver. In this context, any marketing that feels like a "hack," a "trick," or a lazy shortcut signals a profound lack of respect for the gravity of that decision.
This is why the real enemy in B2B marketing isn't a competitor's product; it's the generic, value-extracting communication that pretends to be personal. It’s the automated email that says, "I loved your recent post," when it's obvious a bot scraped a keyword. It's the "free whitepaper" that's nothing more than a thinly veiled sales brochure. These actions are the B2B equivalent of the "accidental discount" lie. They create a trust deficit before the relationship has even begun, forcing your best salespeople to spend their first conversation climbing out of a hole your marketing department dug for them.
The only durable competitive advantage in B2B is to build a brand that is allergic to this kind of fakery. The goal is to move from shallow "personalisation" to genuinely understanding your customers, and at scale. As the thinking in "The Empathy Engine" (https://www.adacreate.com/resources/the-empathy-engine-why-ai-is-the-key-to-human-connection-not-the-enemy-1) suggests, this means investing in the difficult, upfront work of demonstrating true understanding. It means creating content that solves a prospect's problem with no immediate expectation of return. It means using technology not to scale up your own noise, but to listen and respond at scale. It's about building a brand so reliably helpful, insightful, and transparent that when you finally do ask for the sale, the trust is already there. You haven't just earned a customer; you've earned an advocate.