Electric business promotion too hard black Friday fade away

Tencent Science and Technology Jing Jinming Lin Jingdong November 23 Report

Black Friday has long been considered the biggest shopping day of the year, marking the start of the annual holiday shopping season, which has lasted nearly 50 years, but this year has been overshadowed by intense competition and online promotions.

With all the promotions springing up, Black Friday has lost its uniqueness, and the Friday is no longer the only day when consumers can buy the right goods at the lowest price of the year.

"This is the end of the American shopping tradition," said Burt P. Fliginger, general manager of SRG Insight, New York's retail consultancy. ”

Retailers, he says, have created more and more "shopping days" and are doing special promotions every day. Black Friday has become a victim of Darwin's destruction (Darwinian destruction).

In those states that allow retailers to open their doors on holidays, consumers start shopping in black Thursday, Thanksgiving Day.

At the same time, the advent of Super Saturday has also greatly replaced the trend of black Friday as the most Saturday shopping day of the year. The so-called Super Saturday refers to the last Saturday before Christmas. Retailers are also using online marketing campaigns to boost their turnover during the shopping season.

As a Wal-Mart executive recently joked, the new Black Friday should be called "November."

As Massachusetts banned retailers from opening their doors on Thanksgiving and other holidays, black Friday barely maintained its position, and many consumers queued up early for shopping after 0 o'clock midnight.

But before they flooded the malls, many consumers had already started buying gifts at Target or staples. Target has been doing holiday promotions since November 10, and Staples has launched a similar promotional campaign in a week.

Wal-Mart is moving ahead of other retailers and has been doing holiday promotions since November 1.

In most of the states outside Massachusetts, many retailers are still operating on Thanksgiving night, or have launched online promotions that morning, and some retailers have started promotions even in Wednesday.

"The retail community seems impatient, and they all want to get ahead of others," said Salmon, a retail analyst at Kurt in New York and Madison Riley. They are not really sure how the shopping season is going to start, so they keep pushing the various promotions ahead. ”

The black Friday history dates back to the 60 's, as it was initially used by Philadelphia police to describe the large number of shoppers flocking to major shopping malls the day after Thanksgiving. Later, retailers accepted the term and gave it a new meaning, heralding a day when their performance turned to profit.

For decades, retailers have been offering a price-reduction campaign in Friday after Thanksgiving to open a one-year shopping season. Retailers have maintained this tradition, and the annual shopping season usually accounts for 20% of the annual turnover.

However, vicious competition soon emerged, as every retailer wanted to overtake rivals, and they offered more promotional discounts, such as 1.99 dollars to buy a DVD, or 50 percent to sell Sony PSP consoles.

In recent years black Friday has begun to lose its specificity, with 2013 's black Friday total turnover of 14% less than two years ago. But some analysts suggest that retailers are diverting their black Friday promotions to other days, like on Thanksgiving Day, to solve the problem of declining turnover.

"This will generate more spending, get employees to work during the holidays and you may have to pay more," Riley said. ”

On the other hand, allowing consumers to spend more time shopping in a longer shopping campaign may lead to more impulsive shopping practices, which will increase the retailer's total turnover.

Michael Tesler, a professor of retail science at Micheltesler University, said: "You will spend more time out shopping." Retailers want to make this year's performance more than last year, and if they can't offer better goods or lower prices, they need longer promotional time. ”

The U.S. Retail Federation (National Retail Federation) is expected to http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/38174.html this year "> Retail sales in November and December will reach 616.9 billion U.S. dollars, an increase of 4.1% per cent year-on-year.

One of the promotional activities that target launched earlier this month was to cut the popular Beats studio headset by 50 dollars. During the week of Thanksgiving, Target also launched some special promotions in its mobile shopping app, and held a number of promotional events at the physical store in the last Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

On the Black Friday day, Target offered only one promotional event: a 90 percent discount for shopping with gift cards.

Wal-Mart is using Thanksgiving weekend to launch its own promotional activities, starting from the morning of Thursday, until the end of the network in Monday. In other states outside Massachusetts, it offers the biggest discounts in many retail outlets: consumers can buy an ipad mini for 199 dollars on Thanksgiving Day and a 30 dollar gift card for free.

Black Friday the day's promotional campaign is mainly aimed at some less popular products, such as tires and jewelry and so on.

Staples's promotional activities began earlier, and in Sunday it launched a number of promotional activities for corporate users, including a 100-dollar sale of net-cloth office chairs. The traditional top discount will be launched on Thanksgiving Day, including a 99.99-dollar sale of an ASUS laptop, and the purchase of any laptop with a price above $399 will come with a Kindle for free.

"This provides customers with more shopping opportunities to shop at any time, rather than concentrating on one day," said Alison Corcoran, senior vice president of Staples in charge of North American stores and internet marketing. We want our customers to be flexible in arranging their time so that they can Hoder and shop happily. ”