Black Friday

[Gilgongo]

(I didn't know this forum existed!)

My favourite catastrophe

When I joined a well-known online British retailer a few years ago I had a look around on the filesystem, reading various documents to get a feel for things. In among some strategy decks and related stuff, I found one day a Powerpoint deck called "Black Friday Postmortem".

The document was an analysis of an incident that had occured when Black Friday was new to the UK. The marketing team had thought it was a great idea to put a countdown clock on the home page to help promote the campaign, which was also being co-ordinated on TV and the Internet.

The deals themselves were being presented from the start of that week. The clock sat under a large banner proclaiming "Black Friday Bargains!". Logically enough, the team thought, the clock on the home page was set to end when the Black Friday sales ended.

Trading that week was up, but not by very much. And by Friday the marketing team became worried. The clock then duly came to 00:00:00 at midnight and prices went back up again.

Saturday morning saw perhaps the largest amount of inbound call and email traffic in the history of the business. Lines were jammed and hundreds of emails poured in complaining of an uholy bait and switch, and threats to bring in Trading Standards.

The report concluded that nobody was to blame, but that next year they should think the campaign through a bit more.

[Gerry557]

I thought you were going to talk about the last few years of damp squip efforts.

I prefer it when there was mayhem in the shops, something worth fighting for, although I wouldn't personally.

Now things are cheaper often at other times. I'm not sure if it's used just to rid older stock now.

The few bits I bought look like they are going back.... But the prices are currently higher.