DTC Brands Are Breaking The Discount Habit To Drive Long-Term Growth

Direct-to-consumer brands were built on performance discipline, optimizing discount codes, paid media, and conversion funnels with precision. But as the conversation shifts toward long-term, profitable growth, many marketers are faced with a harder truth: the same spreadsheet-driven systems that fueled early success are now limiting it. Short-term incentives can drive transactions, but they rarely build loyalty. While the industry has embraced the idea of brand investment, most teams remain anchored to the same metrics and workflows. As a result, the buyer journey is being reexamined not as a fixed funnel, but as a set of behaviors that require a new approach to retention and value creation.

Alison Ehrmann sees this pattern play out across categories. As CMO at American Greetings, she brings a multi-brand view of how modern marketing teams operate. Her background includes scaling consumer and healthcare brands from under $5 million to more than $500 million in revenue, with leadership roles at Nom Nom, Thirty Madison, FreshDirect, and Toys"R"Us. In her consulting work, the same issue surfaces repeatedly: teams are still planning around a linear customer journey, even when their own data shows that customers don’t behave that way.

"Our brands don't live in the hearts and minds of consumers the same way they do for us. You constantly have to reinforce the message and re-prove your value and place in their hearts and in their wallets," says Ehrmann. That reality makes the shift away from constant promotions more complex than a simple campaign change. For many organizations, it touches the core of how the business operates. Revenue models have been built around predictable discount-driven spikes, so pulling back requires executive alignment and a willingness to absorb slower, less immediate returns. "For the last ten years, the trend was all about success via spreadsheets and a maniacal focus on short-term KPIs," Ehrmann notes. "Incentives are really good at driving those short-term results, but businesses are finally seeing that's not the way to develop loyal bases. There has to be a commitment to invest in brand, pull back on incentives, and take the temporary impact."

• The continuity illusion: Dropping the discount habit exposes a flaw in how many campaigns are built. The idea of a carefully sequenced journey assumes customers are seeing everything, when in reality, most aren’t. That changes the job of each touchpoint. Instead of contributing to a broader narrative, every email, page, or ad has to deliver the message on its own, reinforcing value in isolation as well as in sequence. "A good open rate is maybe 20, 30%. That means 80% of your folks are never even getting that message," Ehrmann explains. "In the marketer's mind, they have sent a sequence that provides continuity and a buildup of messages that all work together. No. Each one of them has to work just as hard on its own as it does in continuity."

• Flipping the funnel: Losing control over when and how people encounter messages is a symptom of a larger shift. Buyers now move unpredictably across channels, creating fragmented journeys that don’t follow a fixed sequence. Rather than a breakdown, that shift is forcing a new approach. As discovery behavior evolves, particularly with the rise of AI-driven search, marketers are rethinking how content is structured and surfaced. The focus is shifting toward making existing content more accessible and relevant within these new environments. "A lot of people are seeing search volume go down," Ehrmann notes. "And so it's about figuring out how to evolve the content that's already published to make it searchable by all of these LLMs, not the content engines."

Further down the funnel, traditional persona-based marketing is starting to show its limits. Static segments often fail to capture how customers actually behave, especially as interactions become more dynamic and context-driven. Newer CRM tools are pushing teams toward a more behavioral approach to shape messaging in real time. With the right data, these systems can deliver more relevant outreach at scale, improving engagement by responding to what customers do rather than who they’re assumed to be. "Personalization in the past has been at the segment level, whether it's a persona or some other kind of strategy," Ehrmann says. "It has to be much more than bucketing them into a persona. We need to look at the visits, recency, and frequency to understand what they've purchased, and AI is helping us get closer and be more relevant to more people."

• Smaller-brand agility: Implementing AI-driven personalization often becomes more complex at the enterprise level. Legacy organizations face layers of approvals, from legal and security to IT roadmaps, that can slow down experimentation. That friction is pushing marketing leaders to take a more targeted approach. Starting with a clearly defined problem allows teams to work within existing systems, identifying underused capabilities rather than defaulting to large-scale vendor changes. "Smaller brands are able to take more risk and they're willing to try things faster," Ehrmann notes. "They're willing to take some pretty big swings. And I think they have more nimble tech stacks that allow some of it as well."

For enterprise marketers, the path forward is more practical than it sounds. The starting point isn’t a broad push for AI adoption, but a clear definition of the problem that needs solving. From there, the focus shifts to applying AI within existing programs, making each message more self-sufficient, each page clearer about value, and each offer more aligned with real customer behavior. Ehrmann believes this approach often begins with auditing current systems to identify underused capabilities before investing in new tools. "I think you need to start by identifying what the problem is that needs to be solved, as opposed to just blankly saying we need AI," she concludes. "Big companies might even want to start there, reviewing the AI tools they already have as part of their tech stack, and lean in. That might be an easier way to create a case for it and get things approved."