How Brands Can Survive and Win During the High Season: Google’s Playbook

The end of the year always feels like a final chord. For retailers, it’s the season of big bets: Black Friday, holiday discounts, and New Year sales. But winning in this crowded, competitive period requires more than slashing prices — it’s about understanding consumer behavior and leveraging the right tools. That was the core message of Google’s recent webinar “Efficiency and Branding During the High Season.”

The Consumer in 2025: Less Room for Error

Consumers today face rising living costs, which means a significant share of household budgets goes to essentials like housing, utilities, food, and healthcare. Discretionary categories — electronics, leisure, fashion — compete for a smaller share of wallet.

At the same time, younger audiences continue to spend on lifestyle categories such as beauty, ready-made meals, and clothing, treating them as necessities rather than luxuries.

And expectations have shifted: people increasingly value responsibility, transparency, and trust in the brands they choose.

Stability vs. Change: What Shapes the High Season

Google analysts identified two forces that define the market landscape in Q4 2025:

• Stability: shopping patterns between online and offline channels, the dominance of mobile-first shopping, and persistently high prices.
• Change: AI reshaping consumer journeys, rising competition, and new digital behaviors.

The 4S Model: Searching, Streaming, Scrolling, Shopping

Today’s consumer interacts with their phone hundreds of times a day, moving across different digital touchpoints. For brands, each touchpoint is an opportunity — or a missed chance.

Google summarizes this journey in four “S” behaviors:

1. Searching — product research through text or image queries.
2. Streaming — engaging with video content on platforms like YouTube.
3. Scrolling — discovering products via social feeds.
4. Shopping — finding the best deal for a chosen product.

Video, in particular, plays a critical role: it builds awareness and trust faster, while helping shorten the path to purchase.

Powerpack: AI as the Retail Advantage

Google’s Powerpack toolkit harnesses AI to help brands stay competitive during peak demand:

• Performance Max — unlocks full cross-channel performance, delivering up to +10% more sales and +8% higher ROAS.
• iMax for Search — the next generation of AI-powered search that interprets not only keywords but also site content, boosting conversion value by 14–27%.
• Demand Gen — drives interest in the consideration stage, adding up to +14% more conversions.

Tactical Advice for the High Season

Google’s guidance for brands is both strategic and practical:

• Stay flexible with budgets: seasonal demand peaks in waves — don’t let rigid caps block growth.
• Adopt smarter bidding: know your breakeven ROAS/CPA and use more aggressive bidding when chasing new or repeat customers.
• Best practices for Performance Max: maintain a clean product feed, ensure up-to-date pricing and availability, and provide a full set of creative assets.
• Best practices for Demand Gen: maximize formats (video, static), use all available placements (YouTube Shorts, InStream, Discover, Gmail), and target high-intent or lookalike audiences.

A Story of One Customer Journey

Picture this: a 26-year-old shopper sees a short video ad for a new sportswear collection while streaming. The next day, the same brand appears in their social feed. A week later, they search for “black winter jacket” — and once again, the brand shows up. By Black Friday, the shopper doesn’t hesitate: the brand is already familiar, the price is right, and the decision feels easy.

This is the power of AI-driven marketing — shortening the purchase journey by days, sometimes weeks.

The Final Message

Competition during the high season is brutal. Prices matter, but so do trust, relevance, and presence at every stage of the consumer journey. Brands that prepare early — fueling algorithms with budgets, feeding campaigns with creative, and showing up consistently — will capture demand before the sales frenzy even begins.

In 2025, success won’t go to the loudest “-50%” discount. It will belong to the brands that entered the shopping basket long before the season officially started.

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