Black Friday has evolved every year. So, when planning for this year’s peak weeks, it is important to understand and learn from past Black Friday sales trends.
In 2014/2015 and 2015/16 it was in a growth phase, and less impor-tant than Christmas as a driver of demand.
By 2016/17 Black Friday-generated sales volume had overtaken festive sales and that trend has continued every year since.
In 2020, despite the pandemic, the whole event period was a success, even though Black Friday week itself, with a -6% decline year-on year, failed to achieve the previous year’s sales for the first time.
Last year’s peak weeks were impacted by a lack of supply, yet sales increased by 5% year-on-year (week 46 to 48), nevertheless.
This reconfirms the need to optimally monitor and manage each week of promotion as part of your Black Friday planning.
Once all about bargains and discounts, analysis of Black Friday data from the most recent years has shown the emergence of trading up and ‘premiumization’ as consumers aspired to own better products and prestige brands.
These also marked the beginning of ‘stretching’ the event across multiple weeks, with manufacturers and retailers giving themselves even more time to exploit this massive promotion period.
Today, we talk about Black Friday as “peak weeks”, the most important sales event in the sector’s calendar.
With an event evolving each year in both length and focus – and even more so in 2020 during the pandemic – your challenge is to stay ahead of this Black Friday evolution. The only sure way forward is sales and category planning based on hard facts and expert insight.
