Relying on deal after deal to attract customers is death-wish marketing. The more often a brand announces, “This is a great deal,” the more customers come to believe that the deal price is the real price. The regular price begins to look inflated. The brand’s perceived value declines. What appears to be a short-term sales success can become a long-term problem for revenue quality and profitability.
When Incentives Become The Brand
The automotive industry has a respectable-sounding word for this behavior: incentives. An incentive can encourage someone to act. It can also be a concession offered to induce a purchase. In the car business, the concession is often cash, financing or a lease offer. The language may be more sophisticated than “price cut,” but customers know what they are being offered.
Nissan’s official offers pages provide a familiar example: shoppers can find a range of vehicle-specific deals, rebates and financing incentives. Nissan is hardly alone. Incentives are embedded in the way the automotive industry sells. The trouble begins when these incentives cease to be occasional sales tools and become the primary reason to choose the brand.
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A Conquest Sale Is Not Necessarily A Quality Sale
For a struggling brand, the perception that its products are always being given away is a dangerous way to pursue growth. Quality revenue growth requires both quantity of sales and quality of sales. Automotive marketers like to talk about “conquesting” customers, meaning winning buyers from competing brands. A conquest sale made because of a cash concession may help this month’s numbers. It does not tell us whether that buyer prefers the brand, will return to it, or will pay anything close to the regular price next time.
For decades, automakers used the Allison-Fisher purchase funnel to understand the path from awareness and familiarity to opinion, consideration, make-model intention, shopping and purchase. It is a useful description of acquisition. It is a poor substitute for a strategy to build loyalty. The traditional funnel ends at the sale. There is no meaningful feedback loop for the relationship that follows. As I argued previously in Why Brand Loyalty Beats Customer Acquisition, a business cannot build enduring value by treating every transaction as if it came from a new customer.
Move the metal off the showroom floor. That has been the governing idea for too much automotive marketing. When the deal is doing most of the selling, the work of building a distinctive, desirable brand gets pushed aside. Price and features take the place of a compelling brand promise.
McDonald’s: A Deal Cannot Fix the Experience
The same issue reaches well beyond automobiles. Consider McDonald’s. The company continues to work on strengthening its U.S. business in an environment of value-conscious consumers. In the second quarter of 2026, McDonald’s reported a 0.8% increase in U.S. comparable sales, with positive check growth partly offset by fewer comparable guest visits. Low-price offers may encourage a visit, but they cannot carry the full burden of restoring the brand’s appeal. Service, reliability, food quality and convenience remain part of the value customers believe they are buying.
Think about a restaurant where the food was good but the service was awful. You may decide the experience was not worth repeating. When the service is outstanding but the food is merely adequate, you may be more inclined to give the place another chance. A wrong order, missing items or a long wait can make even a bargain feel expensive. This is why equating value with low price is such a serious marketing mistake.
Here is an evergreen brand management principle: to be perceived as a fair value rather than simply cheap, a brand must avoid making price the dominant reason to buy.
Deal Loyalty Is Not Brand Loyalty
Building deal loyalty does not create brand loyalty. Deal loyalty is not real loyalty. When a customer buys because of an incentive, that customer may be loyal to the incentive rather than to the brand. Offer a better deal across the street and the customer follows it. A brand experience that people do not prefer will not become more desirable simply because it costs less. As I wrote in The Resurgence Of Brand Loyalty, true loyalty is built on preference and commitment, not the expectation of another price concession.
Of course, brands should reassure customers that they are affordable. Affordability, however, is a long-term strategy. It should be built into the brand’s offer and experience, not tacked on with perpetual promotions. The message should be, “This is a great brand at a great price,” rather than, “This is a great deal for this brand.” Those two statements communicate very different ideas about worth.
Pricing Must Be A Strategy, Not A Reflex
During the original McDonald’s turnaround of 2003–2005, pricing strategy was an important part of rebuilding the business. I say strategy, not tactics. While the “i’m lovin’ it” brand campaign was taking hold, we instituted a three-tier pricing approach. The first tier included Dollar Menu items, affordable limited-time offers and value meals. The second included affordable core products that would not be discounted. The third included a limited selection of premium-priced items. The intent was to offer accessible choices without teaching customers that everything on the menu should be sold at a discount.
Sweetgreen offers a useful contemporary contrast. Customers had come to see its bowls as expensive, partly because an apparently affordable starting price could turn into a $20-plus lunch after additions. Rather than relying solely on another discount, the company has worked to make the value of its menu easier to understand. As The Wall Street Journal reported, Sweetgreen has introduced lower-priced wraps, increased some portions and clarified what customers receive when building their own bowls. Its executives also acknowledged that promotions had attracted diners who often did not become regular full-price customers.
Sweetgreen’s commercial turnaround is not yet assured. That is not the point. The more instructive decision is to address what the customer receives for the price, rather than endlessly reducing the price of an offer the customer may already consider inadequate. Price architecture, portion size, transparency and experience all shape value perceptions. They deserve more management attention than the next coupon.
Promotion Should Elevate, Not Demote
This brings us to another word marketers have diminished: promotion. Everything communicates. Promotion is not merely a series of tactical advertising programs, coupons or limited-time price offers. Brand promotion should be an integrated effort to advocate for the brand and advance it in the customer’s mind.
To promote is to elevate, to move something to a higher position. In brand management, that should be the purpose of marketing communications. Yet the word has become shorthand for “20% off this weekend” or “buy one, get one free.” When marketers distinguish advertising from promotion as if promotion can only mean a short-term deal, they make a false choice. Every communication either contributes to the brand’s standing or weakens it.
The opposite of promote is demote. Too many so-called brand promotions are brand demotions in disguise. They produce sales at the expense of the brand’s perceived worth. An isolated offer may make business sense. Repeated, inconsistent, price-led messages can teach customers that the brand’s promise matters less than the discount. Over time, the brand becomes harder to sell without a concession.
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We saw the power of language after the 2008 recession, when McDonald’s was often described as cheaper food for consumers “trading down.” The description may have appealed to a short-term economic narrative. It did little to advance McDonald’s reputation as a brand people would actively prefer. The restaurant’s customers wanted a satisfying meal and a dependable experience, not a reminder that they had supposedly settled for something less.
Nissan And The Cost Of A Value Gap
The automotive industry has lived with this problem for decades. When we worked on the Nissan turnaround beginning in 1999, Nissan leadership spoke openly about a customer-perceived value gap of more than $1,000 between comparable Nissan and Toyota vehicles. Dealers had to make up much of that difference in price before some shoppers viewed the choices as equivalent. One turnaround goal was to reduce reliance on incentives by offering vehicles and a total brand experience customers genuinely valued.
The Nissan brand idea at the time was Bold & Thoughtful. It respected the company’s Japanese heritage while setting a direction for product and experience. But how could such an idea gain strength if the brand was continually sold as discounted metal? No amount of brand language can overcome an experience, product or pricing practice that contradicts it.
Quantity Of Sales Is Not Quality Of Sales
Sales volume matters. No business survives on admiration alone. But enduring, profitable growth requires a better balance between quantity and quality of sales. A customer who repeatedly chooses a brand because it is preferred is economically different from one who returns only when the price drops. Strong brand loyalty can support repeat business and reduce the pressure to concede margin with each transaction.
Excessive discounting works against that goal. The brand trains customers to expect deals. Those expectations increase price sensitivity. Management responds with more discounts to maintain traffic. Eventually the promotional price becomes the reference price, and the regular price loses credibility. The business can find itself depending on the very practice that is eroding its ability to earn a healthier return.
None of this means a brand should abandon promotions. A well-judged offer can generate traffic, encourage trial or reintroduce a lapsed customer. The danger lies in confusing the temporary response to a deal with enduring customer preference. A spike in volume may look encouraging while masking the loss of price realization and the weakening of brand equity.
Price deals can help deliver profitable growth for a quarter or a year without making that growth enduring. They can also deliver growth that endures but is not profitable. That is a hobby, not a business strategy. Enduring, profitable growth requires the discipline to protect what customers believe the brand is worth. The objective is not to become the cheapest option in the market. It is to build a great brand at a price that excites.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Joan Kiddon, Partner, The Blake Project, author of The Paradox Planet: Creating Brand Experiences For The Age Of I.
At The Blake Project, we help leaders turn brand into a disciplined driver of financial performance — strengthening pricing power, competitive position, and enterprise value. Email us to start a conversation about enduring profitable growth. For The EBITDA.
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