How a Product That Didn't Exist in October Became November's Top Performer — Before the Sales Even Started

This Mission

There's a conventional wisdom in marketing that you don't launch new products during Black Friday. The logic is reasonable enough. Consumers are in bargain-hunting mode. Attention is scarce. Every brand with a budget is competing for the same eyeballs at the same time. Save your launch for more... lucrative times of the year, when the pressure on margins isn't has high.

The problem with conventional wisdom is that everyone follows it. Which means everyone is doing the same thing at the same time, which means nobody stands out, which means the conventional wisdom defeats itself.

When CEE CLEAR came to me in late 2023, they had a new product — the BLUSH Cosmetic Case — and a decision to make about when to introduce it to the world. The safe choice was to wait. The interesting choice was to go early, build desire before the noise peaked, and arrive at Black Friday week with momentum already behind them rather than trying to generate it from scratch in the middle of a war for attention.

This Outcome

This is something we know from the research: most people, at any given moment, are not in the market for your product. They're future buyers. They'll get there eventually, but right now something else is occupying their attention. The instinct of most is to chase the small group who are already shopping. The smarter play, usually, is to prime the much larger group who aren't yet ready — so that when they do come into the market, you're their first choice.

That's what the CEE CLEAR campaign did. It built awareness and desire in the weeks before Black Friday, so that by the time the sales period arrived, there was already a group of people who knew what BLUSH was and wanted it. The campaign didn't need Black Friday. It had already done its work.

This Impact

Eighty percent of all November revenue came in before the Black Friday period began. The launch day alone broke the brands one-day revenue record for a new product that had no existing audience, no reviews, and no history. The overall Media Efficiency Ratio for the campaign was 6.52x.

These are the results of a strategic decision made upstream of any individual ad. The creative mattered. The targeting mattered. But what mattered most was the call to sequence things differently, and to resist the pull toward the obvious and do something that the research, and a bit of honest thinking, suggested would actually work better.

• 6.52x Media Efficiency Ratio for a brand new product
• Record revenue for a launch day
• 80% of November revenue generated before the Black Friday period even began

Services

• Launch strategy
• Pre-launch demand generation
• Performance marketing (Meta Ads)
• Influencer collaboration
• Attribution reporting
• Creative direction