“I ain’t Mr. Right, I’m Mr. Right Now.” Fabolous, on the J.Lo remix of Get Right. I never thought I’d be quoting him on LinkedIn, but desperate times call for different measures. And as we head into Black Friday and Cyber Monday, I think he might have something for the trading meeting. Even the trading meeting feels different this year.
Because right now is where an awful lot of this season will be decided. We have our plans. We have our forecasts. We have the presentation somebody signed off in July. F*Ckin, July. Now we get to find out what happens when customers become involved. That is the 2026 customer. The distracted one, the less well off one, the resilient one, the one who trades in black friday discounts and knows you could do better. The one that is paying 100% more for home heating oil, who is worried about job security or their kids futures, the tired one, the overwhelmed one the impressionable ones and the ones looking to breathe. Behavioural targeting is easy, right?
Traffic curation is becoming less art and more science. Although, the longer I do this, the more I wonder whether it was ever that different. We have always tried to understand where people were, what they wanted and what might persuade them to buy from us. We’ve just become very attached to particular ways of doing it. Sometimes so attached that when they stop working, we spend more money trying to make them work again. Performance marketing, acquisition, marketing.
Meanwhile, the customer has gone somewhere else. This behaviour is a constant - not a nuance.
They are comparing. They are asking somebody. They are looking on a marketplace, watching a video, checking a price, checking delivery, coming back tomorrow. They are trying to spend wisely. Our job is to make ourselves available across the parts of that journey where we can serve them properly. I’m increasingly convinced that this deserves more attention than squeezing another small improvement out of an increasingly expensive place we already occupy.
As I said, behavioural targeting, is easy, right?
I still want us to obsess over our customer lists. Those people have given us their money, their information and, occasionally, the benefit of the doubt. Look after them. Understand what they need. Don’t treat the relationship as permission to send fourteen versions of the same email because the calendar has turned black. This should not be new to you though, these customers should not surprise you nor should you fail to know what will make them happy. This is your bread and butter. Right?
But the next customer might never enter the journey we have designed for them. Being available to that person matters. If the product, stock, margin and delivery proposition work on a relevant channel, I would rather give them a way to buy than insist they come through the route that makes our reporting look tidiest.
And the headlines are hardly going to settle the argument for us.
In the US, Michigan’s October consumer sentiment reading was 48.0, below 53.6 a year earlier. In the same month, the Conference Board’s confidence index rose 7.5 points to 91.7. Different surveys, different questions, different signals. Even the mood needs a bit of investigation before it earns a place in the briefing. Brian Friel introduced us to Gar private and Gar public in Philadelphia Here I Come - an apt analogy for why the customer doesn’t do what they tell us. Just ask Pollsters next Tuesday across all US states.
Against that backdrop, NRF forecasts $1.013 trillion in November and December retail sales, up 4.2%. Adobe expects a record $275.1 billion in US online spending over those two months. Low sentiment and record spending forecasts, sitting quite happily beside each other. Which one are you meant to take into the meeting?
Then Deloitte forecasts between $316.1 billion and $318.9 billion in ecommerce sales. Except its holiday period runs from November through January. Adobe’s ends in December. NRF’s trillion-dollar number covers broader retail. Before we even debate whether a forecast is right, we have to work out whether we are discussing the same thing.
That doesn’t make the research useless. It makes reading beyond the headline part of the job. It is why I podcast or write - even poorly. A national spending record doesn’t tell you whether your customer has another €40 to spend with you. It certainly doesn’t tell you whether you can afford to acquire them. People can feel under pressure and still buy Christmas presents. They can spend more money and come home with less. The aggregate can look healthy while the business at your trading table has a very different morning.
This is where I find myself thinking about some of the people I’ve been talking to lately. People who have been in commerce twenty years or more. Who have moved sideways, moved companies, done the difficult job, been promised the next one. Some have spent a decade thinking the CEO role was coming. Or that the startup would exit. Or that this DTC brand would be the one that changed everything for them. People generally who have aged better than me but are around the same amount of time.
For some, those things haven’t happened. They may never happen. That’s a hard thing to sit with when you have put years of yourself into it. But something else is happening in those conversations. There’s energy again. They are interested. There is a problem to get their teeth into. Quite a few problems, actually. Commerce has been generous in that respect.
I recognise it because I feel it myself. I think I’ve learned more in the last six months than I did in the previous five years. There is so much moving that you have to pay attention again. You have to ask better questions. You have to be willing to discover that something you were very confident about last month no longer deserves quite so much confidence.
And people who came through commerce in the early 2000s have some useful experience here. They worked with complicated systems. They had to understand the plumbing, or sit beside somebody patient enough to explain it. They knew that changing something in one place could create a fairly spectacular problem somewhere else. They had to think like architects because someone had to understand how the whole thing held together.
These are people who went to the Christmas party with a laptop. Who heard a pingdom alert on their phone halfway through a drink and immediately started calculating how far they were from a socket. (remembering Paul Maxwell here who we lost this year. A good good man- isnt’t that right Ian) They learned by getting things wrong, fixing them and then explaining why it wouldn’t happen again. Usually with a qualification about the bit they still didn’t entirely trust.
I don’t want the laptop back at the Christmas party. I do want that understanding in the room. That resilience. The ability to trace a problem through the business, ask who else needs to know and make a decision before every last piece of information has arrived. When channels multiply and systems become more connected, that experience becomes useful in new ways. Pair it with people who understand the newer channels and you have a team with something to offer each other.
Take AI-assisted shopping. Adobe forecasts a 130% year-on-year increase in traffic from AI services to US retail sites this holiday season. That measures people clicking through; it doesn’t mean AI will account for 130% more of everybody’s business. But it gives us something worth investigating. Can a customer find the right product information? Is the stock accurate? Does the delivery promise survive the journey into the order?
The new route brings you back to the plumbing. It also brings you back to the customer, who is unlikely to be impressed by the sophistication of your discovery experience if the item doesn’t arrive.
Which is why, for me, contingency is the plan.
You need a starting position. You need a commercial objective. You need to know which customers you are serving, what you can sell profitably and what you can deliver. Then you need to prepare the team for the possibility that some of your assumptions will be wrong. Give people permission to bring that information into the room while there is still time to do something with it.
At a trading table, I want freedom and understanding. Freedom to say a campaign isn’t doing what we expected. Understanding of why we chose it, what we were trying to achieve and what would justify changing it. There is very little value in asking a team to be agile if moving a small amount of budget still requires three meetings and somebody’s emotional recovery.
The questions I keep coming back to are fairly simple. What did we learn yesterday? What does that change today? What are we still assuming? A disappointing result should give us something to investigate. If people spend the meeting defending the original decision, we lose another day.
When I say there’s no wrong answer, just a wrong attitude, that’s what I mean. We can make a bad call. We can lose money. We need to acknowledge it and understand it. But people should feel able to bring an honest answer into the room, even when it’s an uncomfortable one. Hiding it, defending it, refusing to learn from it: that’s where we have a bigger problem.
The monthly plan still matters. So does the overall Q4 objective. But the daily and weekly objectives need enough substance to help people choose. If we are trying to acquire customers, what can we afford to pay? If we need to move stock, which stock, and what margin are we prepared to accept? If a new channel shows promise, what would we need to see before putting more behind it? Those decisions are much easier when the team knows the boundaries before the pressure arrives.
And we have tools now that make parts of this easier than they used to be. AI can help assemble the daily briefing, compare what changed, pull together questions for the trading meeting and challenge an explanation we have become a little too fond of. With the right access and checks, we can spend less of the morning collecting information and more of it deciding what to do.
I find that exciting. I can ask for another interpretation. I can ask what evidence would disprove mine. I still need to check the numbers and make the decision, but I have more ways to question myself than I had before. For somebody who has been doing this a long time, that is a fairly good reason to feel energised.
I don’t know which headline will best describe this Black Friday when we look back on it. I do know that I want to sit with people who are curious enough to notice what is happening and comfortable enough with each other to say when something needs to change. People who can look after the customers we have while making room for the ones arriving somewhere we didn’t expect.
We’ll have a plan when we sit down. By the time we get up, I’d like us to have learned enough to improve it.
And tomorrow morning, we’ll ask again.
What did we learn?