It’s Christmas and ‘tis the season for banging out emails and so amongst the work mail and penile related spam my inbox attracts are an increasing number of commercial offers from retailers I shop with regularly.

A lot of these are welcome – offering discounts on goods I often buy, from traders I respect. However there is a problem. Some offers are starting to arrive so frequently as to appear desperate and as any person being courted will tell you, the cologne of desperation is not an attractive one.

In contrast to the retailer offering hourly discounts on everything from their granny to the kitchen sink are those absent who won’t or can’t compete in the currently rampant discount market – their brand value stubbornly intact, at least until the year’s profit figures come out.

Of course it’s proving hard for retailers to steer a straight ship in these unusual trading conditions – the route is somewhere between the rocks of discounting in the short term and the hard place of not devaluing your brand over the long term.

To do this takes resource – one of the prevailing myths is that email is cheap – it isn’t, at least not to do well and it also takes long term strategic thought. Some retailers may be in the fight for Christmas but what about January, February & March? Rather than the 12 days of Christmas, retailers should be thinking in terms of the 12 months of Christmas.

It’s not just congestion zone stakeholders who are obsessed with traffic, so too it seems are some start-ups, and not in a good way.

I use a couple of web services, one is for builders (a service which is both creditable and painful). Annoyingly, when a builder posts a message against my enquiry I get an email or text message asking me to login to see it. This is a bit like a receptionist phoning to say they have a message for you and would you mind going down to reception to hear it. Why not just give them the message? Of course this has nothing to do with making the customer’s life easier and everything to do with boosting the website’s visitor figures.

People rapidly get fed up with this. What they really want is to receive information by their preferred channel – usually email and have the option to start a dialogue if they need to. This is essential in some sectors – for example restaurants where customers will often have questions they need answering before and after they book.

Start-ups (indeed all sites) need to understand that customer experience drives the success of the site and that increased traffic is just a by-product of that. Trying to recycle customers through the site will just lead to them cycling off.

In these unprecedented times, confidence it seems, is everything. A lack of it has had unbelievable consequences for some former giants of the financial markets and trickling down, smaller businesses now have to factor in the potential fallout.

Consumers don’t want to order something from a supplier that might be bought out, sold off or floated off on a bankrupt debt raft. To gain trust, the onus is on businesses to be open and inform customers if there are changes in ownership that might impact on supply of goods.

This is partly a question of nerve and whether businesses are looking at the long term picture. A failure to do this got the banking sector into trouble and it could cause retailers problems too.

Looking around at all the pre Christmas discounts available, it makes you wonder what everyone is going to do in January? If customers continue to be offered discounts everywhere, they’ll eventually consider that the norm and we’ll have devalued our own market.

We need to get our eyes back off our stumbling feet and on the near horizon.