IMRG flags Covid pandemic powered Black Friday changes

This year, Black Friday is officially on 26th November (the day following Thanksgiving in the US). But, since Thanksgiving is not celebrated in the UK, there has always been scope for extending when Black Friday campaigns actually start, and how long they last.

While this has been a trend for a number of years, the Covid pandemic may have accelerated it to an extent that has bought about some changes to the festive trading season.

IMRG ran a poll of 60 retailers to understand when they would launch their Black Friday campaigns in 2021.

33% will do so by the end of week two of November, whereas in 2020 only 20% were live by that point.

Although the trend has been for earlier launches, the week of Black Friday itself had still been accounting for a greater share of the overall sales from the four weeks of November.

In 2018, Black Friday week took 35% of the revenue over the four weeks, and in 2019 this rose to 41%.

The lockdown is likely to have been a big factor, but in 2020 this dropped to a three-year low of 33% with each of the other three weeks taking a greater share.

With so many stories in the media encouraging people to shop early for Christmas, this pandemic powered trend may continue again in 2021.

The official day of Black Friday is still very significant, however, and increased its share of revenue (of the eight-day week running from Monday of Black Friday week through to Cyber Monday) from 20% in 2019 to 22% in 2020.

This may be related to the fatigue of campaigns running for such a long period. So while people want to get a good deal, many aren’t interested enough to monitor sites for weeks, preferring to just focus activity on a single day.

There’s still a peak within a peak, which is the actual day of Black Friday, but customer perception of when it happens may well become confused. This is due to campaigns increasingly running over multiple weeks and even longer.

It does seem likely that the share of sales will continue to spread out as a consequence, but this year, actual online sales growth for the month of November, and Black Friday itself, will probably be negative. It could be as much as -10% for both, due to the very strong growth in 2020.

This means that, for the first time, less money will be spent online on Black Friday than the previous year, but this does not mean volumes are low. They will remain high, but volumes are rationalising somewhat following astronomical growth in 2020.

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