The holiday shopping season is shaping up to be bigger, more competitive and more complicated than ever. Consumers are spending, but they’re also scrutinizing every purchase. Here’s what marketers need to understand before the year’s biggest shopping event.
Black Friday has always been a contest for consumer attention, but in 2026, the battle is shifting from who can generate the loudest promotional message to who can deliver the most convincing combination of value, relevance and convenience. The traditional playbook of deep discounts, aggressive advertising and last-minute urgency is being challenged by consumers who have more information, more ways to shop and increasingly sophisticated tools to help them make decisions.
The commercial opportunity remains enormous. Holiday retail sales are expected to grow approximately 4.2% to more than $1 trillion, while ecommerce growth could approach 8% during the extended holiday shopping period. These projections suggest a resilient consumer economy, even as inflation, household debt and persistent concerns about affordability continue shaping purchasing decisions.
The interesting story, however, isn’t how much consumers will spend. It’s how differently they’ll allocate that spending, when they’ll make their decisions and which brands will earn the right to participate.
Black Friday falls on November 27 this year, but the competition is already underway. More consumers are starting their holiday shopping earlier, with roughly one in five planning to begin sooner than last year and more than a quarter of holiday budgets potentially exhausted by the end of October. With promotional events stretching across multiple months, brands waiting until Thanksgiving week to create demand may discover they’re competing for money consumers have already committed elsewhere.
The Biggest Shift: Value Is Replacing Discounting as the Competitive Advantage
The defining characteristic of Black Friday 2026 may be the growing distinction between price and value. Consumers remain willing to spend, but increasingly expect brands to demonstrate why a purchase makes sense, rather than simply presenting a lower number alongside a crossed-out higher one.
Average household holiday spending could reach approximately $1,650, an increase of 4% over 2025. At the same time, nearly four in 10 consumers are actively seeking value through promotions, loyalty rewards and lower-cost alternatives. Perhaps most revealing, these value-focused consumers are expected to spend more than shoppers who place less emphasis on finding deals.
This creates an important strategic distinction. Value-conscious consumers aren’t necessarily reluctant consumers; many are actively looking for reasons to spend, provided they believe they’re making an intelligent decision.
The winners will be brands capable of communicating value beyond percentage discounts, combining attractive pricing with quality, convenience, reliability, useful product information and rewards that strengthen the customer relationship. The losers will be brands that mistake lower prices for stronger propositions, sacrificing margin without giving consumers a meaningful reason to choose them over comparable alternatives.
AI Is Becoming the New Shopping Intermediary
For the first time, AI-powered shopping assistants are entering the holiday season as a meaningful part of mainstream product discovery. Rather than browsing dozens of websites, consumers can increasingly describe what they need, specify their budget and preferences, and receive recommendations assembled around those requirements.
Approximately one-third of consumers are highly receptive to using generative AI for holiday gift recommendations, while nearly four in 10 expect to use AI as a primary tool for at least one holiday shopping task. However, a much smaller share are comfortable allowing AI to complete purchases on their behalf. That gap illustrates both the opportunity and the limitation: AI is becoming influential in discovery, but consumers aren’t universally ready to surrender control of the transaction.
For marketers, AI introduces a new competitive environment in which traditional search visibility, paid rankings and brand familiarity may not be sufficient. Product descriptions, reviews, availability, pricing transparency and authentic customer experiences all have the potential to influence which products are recommended, although the precise mechanisms vary between AI platforms.
The most important adjustment isn’t simply optimizing content for AI search. It’s making products easier to understand, compare and recommend, while preserving visibility across conventional search, social platforms, retail websites and creator communities.
This could particularly benefit niche and independent brands that solve specific consumer needs exceptionally well. Their opportunity is to compete on relevance rather than advertising scale, provided the underlying product information and consumer evidence are accessible to recommendation systems.
The Winners: Brands That Make Shopping Easier, More Relevant and More Rewarding
1. Value-Led Retailers That Understand the Difference Between Cheap and Worthwhile
Mass-market retailers, warehouse clubs, private-label brands and businesses offering transparent everyday pricing enter Black Friday with a structural advantage. Their positioning aligns with a consumer mindset increasingly focused on stretching household budgets without abandoning holiday traditions.
However, the greatest opportunity isn’t necessarily for the retailer offering the deepest discount. It’s for the one that helps consumers feel confident they’re getting the best overall deal, whether that means loyalty benefits, bundled products, free delivery, accessible returns or reliable quality.
This favors retailers capable of delivering consistent value across the entire customer experience. A slightly more expensive product with dependable delivery, strong reviews and straightforward returns may ultimately prove more attractive than a cheaper alternative surrounded by uncertainty.
2. Brands That Win Discovery Before Black Friday
The gradual expansion of promotional shopping into September and October creates a considerable advantage for marketers capable of influencing purchasing decisions before consumers enter the final stages of comparison shopping. Brands that establish consideration early are less dependent on buying attention at precisely the moment competition becomes most expensive.
Successful marketers will treat the holiday season as an extended decision-making journey, combining useful content, creator recommendations, organic discovery, audience development and retargeting with carefully timed promotional offers. Rather than attempting to manufacture demand in a single weekend, they’ll enter Black Friday with an existing audience already interested in their products.
The opportunity extends beyond large retailers. Niche brands with strong communities, distinctive positioning and highly relevant products may find themselves better equipped to attract qualified demand than competitors whose primary strategy is promotional volume.
3. Creator-Led Brands and Social Commerce
Social media has evolved from a source of inspiration into an increasingly important part of the purchasing process, especially for younger consumers. Demonstrations, comparisons, tutorials and authentic recommendations provide the context that conventional product listings often lack, helping shoppers understand why a product might be appropriate for them.
Social platforms and affiliate channels are becoming increasingly influential in generating holiday revenue, with creator-driven recommendations playing a growing role in connecting discovery to conversion. Although established shopping channels still account for the majority of transactions, the expanding influence of social commerce underscores how purchasing decisions are becoming more distributed across the digital environment.
For Black Friday 2026, the advantage will favor brands that have invested in credible creator relationships rather than simply purchasing last-minute sponsored posts. Creators who understand their audiences and demonstrate genuine product relevance can help brands compete in a market saturated with interchangeable offers.
The winners will be those making creators an integral part of discovery, education and conversion. The losers will be businesses treating influencer marketing as another distribution channel for promotional codes.
4. Retailers That Have Mastered Mobile Commerce
Mobile isn’t the future of holiday shopping; it’s already the dominant transaction environment. Smartphones accounted for more than half of online holiday sales in 2025, reinforcing the importance of designing the entire shopping experience around smaller screens, faster decisions and minimal friction.
For marketers, this means mobile performance is no longer simply a technical consideration. Every unnecessary checkout step, confusing product page, poorly optimized advertisement or unexpected shipping charge can undermine the effectiveness of campaigns designed to attract high-intent shoppers.
Retailers that connect persuasive mobile creative with fast-loading pages, useful product information, convenient payment options and clear delivery expectations will be better positioned to turn attention into revenue. Businesses still relying on cumbersome ecommerce experiences may find that even aggressive promotional investment cannot overcome the friction they create.
5. Experience, Gifting and Self-Purchase Brands
The 2026 holiday season offers important opportunities outside traditional gift categories. Around half of consumers are considering experiential gifts, while many of those shoppers also expect to pair experiences with physical products. Self-gifting is another growing behavior, with younger consumers showing particularly strong interest in purchasing something for themselves.
These behavioral shifts create opportunities for entertainment, travel, hospitality, beauty, wellness, fashion and lifestyle brands to participate in the season without relying entirely on conventional discount-driven gifting.
The strongest campaigns may combine products with experiences, exclusivity or personalization, providing an emotional justification for purchasing that extends beyond the financial incentive. In a market where practically every retailer can announce a sale, creating something consumers genuinely want to give or receive offers a different route to differentiation.
The Losers: Brands That Confuse Activity With Performance
1. The Discount-Dependent Middle
The most vulnerable retailers this Black Friday may be those occupying the increasingly uncomfortable space between clear value leadership and genuine brand differentiation. Without the pricing advantages of mass merchants or the emotional appeal of stronger premium brands, these businesses risk becoming interchangeable options in an environment where comparison shopping has never been easier.
Persistent promotions can create temporary demand while conditioning consumers to avoid full-price purchases. They can also make it more difficult to maintain margins, particularly when advertising costs, fulfillment expenses and product acquisition costs are already under pressure.
The danger is a familiar one: strong traffic, impressive gross sales and promotional campaigns that appear successful until the true cost of generating those sales becomes clear.
2. Brands Optimizing for Impressions Instead of Incremental Revenue
Black Friday generates extraordinary amounts of advertising activity, but more impressions don’t automatically translate into additional customers. Marketers competing for consumers already intending to purchase can end up paying increasingly high prices to influence transactions that might have happened anyway.
This is especially relevant for brands using retail media, paid search and performance advertising as their primary holiday growth engines. Attribution models that reward the last interaction before purchase can obscure whether spending generated incremental demand or simply captured existing intent.
The businesses most at risk are those treating return on ad spend as the definitive measure of campaign effectiveness, without accounting for profit margins, new customer acquisition, cannibalization or long-term customer value.
In 2026, the critical metric isn’t simply how much revenue a campaign produces. It’s how much additional profitable revenue the campaign actually creates.
3. Retailers Caught Between Rising Costs and Consumer Expectations
Persistent inflation, higher input costs and tariff-related uncertainty are creating a difficult environment for certain product categories. Toy prices, for example, have risen by more than 6% over the past year, illustrating the pressure that manufacturing, transportation and trade-related expenses can place on holiday merchandise.
These pressures create an uncomfortable choice for retailers: absorb higher costs and protect consumer pricing, or pass those increases along and risk weaker demand. The problem becomes particularly acute during Black Friday, when consumers expect meaningful discounts regardless of how much it costs retailers to deliver them.
The winners will likely be companies with resilient supply chains, strong inventory planning and sufficient margin flexibility to offer genuine value. Retailers facing excess inventory, limited promotional flexibility or unpredictable fulfillment costs could struggle to convert strong seasonal demand into sustainable profitability.
4. Businesses That Make Convenience an Afterthought
Consumers may spend considerable time finding the right product, but the actual purchasing decision can be lost in seconds. Slow websites, unclear delivery timelines, limited payment options and restrictive return policies all introduce uncertainty precisely when retailers need to make transactions feel effortless.
Return fees remain unpopular with most consumers, while younger shoppers are particularly likely to purchase multiple product variations with the intention of returning some. These behaviors create a difficult operational balance between customer convenience and the costs associated with fulfillment and returns.
The brands that succeed won’t necessarily promise unlimited convenience at any cost. They’ll establish clear expectations, make policies easy to understand and design purchasing experiences that reduce uncertainty before it turns into abandoned carts or expensive returns.
The Wild Cards That Could Decide Black Friday 2026
Buy Now, Pay Later: Conversion Tool or Warning Sign?
Flexible payment options will play an increasingly significant role in the holiday economy, particularly among younger shoppers managing competing financial priorities. Buy now, pay later accounted for approximately $20 billion in online holiday spending in 2025, demonstrating how financing flexibility is becoming a more established component of the ecommerce experience.
Nearly one-third of consumers plan to use buy now, pay later for holiday gifts, with adoption particularly high among Gen Z. At the same time, concerns about repayment obligations reveal the financial pressures that may be influencing these choices.
For marketers, the opportunity lies in making purchases more manageable without encouraging irresponsible spending. Brands that present financing transparently and responsibly may improve conversion, while businesses using installment payments primarily to make expensive products appear artificially affordable risk creating longer-term trust problems.
The Retail Media Measurement Problem
Retail media networks have become important channels for brands looking to influence purchase decisions close to the point of sale. As holiday competition intensifies, these platforms offer attractive targeting opportunities, particularly when retailers can connect advertising activity with actual transactions.
But the proliferation of networks, reporting standards and attribution methodologies also creates challenges. Marketers may find themselves navigating multiple platforms that each claim credit for the same consumer journey, making it difficult to understand whether additional advertising investment is generating meaningful business growth.
The brands that benefit most will approach retail media as part of an integrated commercial strategy, measuring incremental sales, customer acquisition and profitability rather than treating platform-reported returns as definitive evidence of success.
The Problem With Too Much Personalization
AI-powered targeting and customer data offer marketers unprecedented opportunities to customize promotional messages, but greater personalization doesn’t always produce better experiences. In a season already saturated with advertising, brands risk overwhelming consumers with increasingly repetitive recommendations, urgency messaging and retargeting.
The winning approach will prioritize useful personalization over sheer frequency, recognizing that consumers often want help narrowing their options rather than another dozen reminders about products they’ve already considered.
What Will Ultimately Decide the Winners?
Across these emerging trends, five capabilities are likely to determine which brands outperform competitors during the 2026 holiday shopping season: the ability to establish value without relying exclusively on price reductions, earn consumer attention before peak promotional periods, remain discoverable across increasingly fragmented shopping journeys, remove friction from the purchasing experience and measure the profitability of demand rather than simply the volume of transactions.
These capabilities share an important characteristic. None can be developed effectively in the final days before Black Friday, because each depends on investments in customer understanding, brand credibility, technology, operations or measurement that extend well beyond a single promotional event.
This is the larger lesson for marketers. Black Friday has become less of a standalone campaign opportunity and more of a stress test for the entire marketing organization, exposing weaknesses in customer relationships, pricing strategy, digital experience and commercial decision-making.
The Bottom Line: The Biggest Sale Isn’t Necessarily the Biggest Win
Black Friday 2026 is shaping up to be another substantial commercial event, but strong industry-wide spending doesn’t guarantee success for individual brands. A resilient holiday economy can coexist with weak consumer confidence, aggressive discounting, lower margins and significant differences between the performance of individual retailers.
The most successful brands won’t necessarily be those attracting the greatest crowds, generating the most impressions or reporting the largest percentage increases in promotional revenue. They’ll be the companies capable of capturing demand without undermining profitability, strengthening customer relationships rather than merely completing transactions, and making themselves useful in an environment where consumers have more choices than ever.
The real test of Black Friday 2026 won’t be how much consumers buy over one extended weekend. It will be which brands emerge from the season with more customers, stronger loyalty and healthier businesses than they had when the promotions began.
For marketers, that is the difference between winning Black Friday and simply surviving another sale.