Happy Thanksgiving week, which means my inbox is full of brands telling me how grateful they are for my loyalty, my support, my continued patronage. Brands I bought from once in 2019. Brands whose emails I have marked as spam three times. Brands I am genuinely not sure how they got my email in the first place.
Corporate gratitude is a genre and it is almost universally terrible.
Here is why: gratitude requires specificity to feel real. When a friend thanks you, they thank you for something. For showing up. For listening. For that specific thing you did that specific time. When a brand thanks you, they thank you for... existing? Having an email address? Not unsubscribing yet? The vagueness betrays the insincerity.
I am not saying brands should not express thanks. I am saying the way most brands do it reveals that they do not actually know their customers well enough to thank them for anything specific. And that gap is more damaging than saying nothing.
The brands that do gratitude well make it transactional in the best sense. Not "we are grateful for you" but "here is something valuable, no strings, because you have been here." A genuine gift. Early access. A real discount (not the fake kind where you inflate the price first). Something that costs the brand something. Gratitude without sacrifice is just words.
My favorite example this year: a small Portland coffee roaster sent their subscribers a free bag with a handwritten note that said "You have bought 23 bags from us this year. This one is on us. We noticed you shifted from medium to dark roast around March. Good call." That is gratitude. It is specific. It costs them something. It demonstrates knowledge. It feels human.
Compare that to the enterprise brand sending a mass email with a stock photo of autumn leaves and the message "From our family to yours, we are so thankful for customers like you." Customers like me? What does that even mean? You do not know me. You know my email address and my purchase history, and you clearly have not looked at either.
If you cannot be specific, be generous. If you cannot be generous, be silent. The authenticity gap between corporate gratitude and real gratitude is obvious to every consumer, even if they cannot articulate why. And in an era where trust is the scarcest brand asset, performative thankfulness actively erodes the thing you are trying to build.
The authenticity gap between corporate gratitude and real gratitude is obvious to every consumer, even if they cannot articulate why.
Now if you will excuse me, I am going to go be genuinely grateful for my cat, my karaoke friends, and the hot sauce store on Hawthorne. They know what they did.