I used to work in advertising and have a degree in it (lest you think I'm talking out of my ***). Companies that are doing well don't need sales, and they're almost always a death knell. Once a company starts offering sales, there is no turning back, as consumers stop buying from that company and wait until something is going on sale.
Many years ago, Rolling Rock beer was struggling because they had positioned themselves in the marketplace as a cheap brand. That worked well when the economy took a downturn and people perceived them as a budget brand, but as people made more money they no longer wanted to buy budget beer. They opted to change nothing, but raise the price on their beer, and surprisingly sales went up. People now viewed them as a premium product. This won't work in today's market for a variety of reasons (incredible competition from "artisan" microbrews), but it shows a bit about how the psychology of it works.
Once a company appeals to a lowest common denominator in the interest of short term gains, as Craftsman did, it is incredibly difficult to turn it around. They have established themselves as the cheap but decent brand, but these days everyone has a lifetime warranty and many are even cheaper (such as Kobolt and Husky). To try and turn a bigger profit for shareholders in the short term, they ruined their brand. They might be able to recover it if they did something to differentiate, such as bring all production back to America and doing a media blitz with some big differentiator, but it's very costly and they likely don't have the capital.
Apple never has sales, and all of their dealers are required to match prices. The only reason people don't buy is when they're waiting for a new model to come out, so Apple has worked extremely hard (and somewhat unsuccessfully) to prevent leaks of new products. But they understand the psychology of it, and have proven that it can be successful in the long term. But if they try and give in to pressure to increase short term profits, it will surely lead to a gradual decline that would ultimately leave them struggling.
It's amazing that more companies don't realize this--it's really Marketing 101--but when pressure is on to produce profits, a CEO who knows he's getting a multimillion dollar bonus and will be out in 10 years doesn't care.
Just look at how Klein has handled things, and you'll see that they're having a hard time right now figuring out what to do. They claim to be a premium product, and price themselves as such, but half their products are being produced to a lower price point and consumers are starting to notice. They're going to have a hard time maintaining market share now that they've started diluting the one thing that still set them apart: Made in USA.
