IMRG has its say on Black Friday 2017

IMRG has announced its Black Friday 2017 forecast, covering the eight days from Monday, 20th to Monday, 27th November, when it expects sales and marketing activity to be at its highest pre-Christmas levels. It estimates that the total spend on UK online retail sites will reach £7.42 billion (15% up from £6.45 billion during the same period in 2016). £1.35 billion will be splashed out on Black Friday itself (9% up from £1.23 billion on Black Friday 2016).

Andy Mulcahy, Strategy and Insight Director at IMRG, comments: “Black Friday has created this idea that there is ‘a time’ to shop in the lead-up to Christmas, but this has resulted in a lull in sales activity preceding Black Friday week. Consequently, many retailers are already running discount campaigns well in advance of the Black Friday week to help stimulate sales – we are tracking 210 UK retail sites daily throughout November and, on Monday, 13th November (one week before the peak week begins), 80 of them were actively promoting discounts on their homepages. Of that 80, just six were marketed as Black Friday events, three mentioned that their Black Friday event was coming soon and five used the term to run associated, but not actual, Black Friday campaigns – such as ‘the Black Friday warm-up…’ or ‘why wait for Black Friday…’. It’s also become common to use black backgrounds to campaign imagery to imply it’s Black Friday, but without overtly mentioning it.”

He adds: “What’s interesting is that some of the discounts on offer are already very high – of the 80 actively promoting discounts, 46 had ‘up to 30%’ as their headline discounts with 33 of those marketing 50% and over. This raises some interesting questions; will the deals on Black Friday be bigger than that, or are deals that are just as good already available? Will shoppers realise they can get really good deals throughout November anyway and adapt their purchasing behaviour, or will the psychological power of the term ‘Black Friday’ make them delay spend in anticipation that it’s still ‘the’ time to shop? And finally, based on the data, does Black Friday now technically last for the whole month of November, just without using the name necessarily?”