Why Black Friday is to retailers what Christmas is to turkeys

Black Friday has been around for a while and is reputed to still be the biggest shopping day of the year in the US. When the term was first coined, it was an event created to capitalise on the large number of Americans taking the day off after Thanksgiving to start their holiday shopping – a day when retailers moved from the ‘red’ to the ‘black’. It came to the UK in 2013 accompanied by the pitiful sight of British shoppers assaulting each other in pursuit of a cut price telly in ASDA

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But whilst it might be offering retailers a short term sales boost, it runs the risk of destroying them in the longer run. In fact the damage may already have been done. For one thing, it’s no longer just a day. Here in the UK Black Friday deals have been running for at least a week already, and are set to continue into early December. Marketers and researchers who know a thing or two will tell you that price promotions don’t increase sales in the long run, they merely move the timing of purchases. A case in point: John Lewis reported a +8% sales increase during a recent Black Friday week but a 1% drop in sales for the year overall. So to start discounting heavily at what should be your peak selling period makes no sense at all.

Secondly, once you’ve entered the Black Friday discounting game, it’s hard to go back. Price is most retailers’ or brands’ single biggest weapon of self-destruction. To feel obliged or panicked into joining a discounting frenzy implies a lack of belief that your brand has much else to offer.

So how do you put the genie back in the bottle?

Beyond the day job I’m a jewellery designer/maker. One of the platforms I sell on, Etsy, is trying to encourage me to participate in their 20% off everything cyber event starting tomorrow. I’m holding my nerve and refusing to play, After all Etsy’s a marketplace: that means if a product has a market and is well priced it will sell. My orders are up 82% on my best year ever and revenue has more than doubled year on year. Instead I’m going to believe in my brand for the long run, not just the next week, and sit it out.

And that’s what strong, well managed brands should do. My first job when I moved out of Thanet and up in the world was as a media buyer. When the FT had an empty advertising page available short term they would give it away rather than discount it, a unique position amongst British print media owners. For the FT to start discounting would make every conversation a negotiation at a time when your options were ratecard or nothing. They did it to protect their yields and their brand in the long term. As far as I’m aware the FT is still around and faring better than most of its peers from that time.

And on the High Street, Zara runs just two sales a year and I, for one, get quite excited by their scarcity. Admittedly they also do something on Black Friday itself but just for one day. Zara is a brand that knows its market, prices well and doesn’t look to devalue that by constant discounting.

Having that long term vision and belief in the value in your brand is key. Driven by the availability of on-tap measurement, there's been a terrifying shift in the last decade from long term strategic thinking to fretting about yesterday's data. It's leading to more and more firefighting tactics at the expense of strategy to the point that I'm starting to think that some brands and retailers don't really believe themselves that they'll still be around in 5 years.

With double digit inflation and considerable economic uncertainty this Christmas could go either way for retailers. But if it goes badly retailers need to share some of the blame for their own downfall. Because once we’ve got Black Friday out of the way, they’ll hit us with Cyber Monday, and then the Christmas sales in mid December. It’s a tired old argument to say the High Street is being killed by online: smart retailers are omnichannel brands and shouldn’t really care whether you turn up to buy it yourself or have it delivered. Instead it’s this continuous discounting that’s consolidating us as a nation where cheapness matters above all else. That’s not a world brands can thrive in. The British shopper has always loved a deal, it’s just that now they won’t get out of bed for anything less than 40% off.

Qualitative research: Is It All Over for Big Data?

I was reminded recently of a wonderful project Rightmove did with the talented Mary Coyne of Hope & Anchor and which was presented at the Market Research Summit.

The research involved spending the best part of a day in peoples’ homes, the aim to elicit the anecdotes and memories that make up the DNA of profound happiness people feel living in those homes . The debrief was delivered using just their voices, allowing us to immerse ourselves in their stories whilst filling in the pictures for ourselves. I’ve been doing this research thing for a while and I can honestly say it was a piece of genius.

In a fascinating conference agenda covering everything from ethnography and communities to neuroscience and AI, this was purely and simply a piece of traditional qualitative research done brilliantly. And it stood out like a sore thumb (although, if the comments from people afterwards were anything to go by, in a good way).

So what was it about this research that brought a room full of hard nosed stakeholders to tears when it was debriefed whilst delivering exactly what we needed as a business? For me it was the quality of those conversations. As clientside researchers we make decisions all the time about qual or quant, and whether to do depths, focus groups, ethnography or communities etc. And there’s often an implicit assumption when making those choices that all qualitative conversations are equal. But they absolutely aren’t. Digital conversations and human conversations are fundamentally different. When I briefed this project originally I was fully expecting to be recommended a community. I now know that a community, whilst wonderful for many things, would never have given us what we needed.

Mark Ritson the Marketing Week columnist talks about “marketers having a long and illustrious track record of being inanely attracted to the latest flashing knobs of technology which will change everything for marketers". Few of them ever do. And I worry that market researchers are falling into some of the same traps. We’re still debating really stupid questions like “Will big data kill research?” This isn’t a battle to the death to declare one discipline’s superiority over another. It’s a just a challenge, a challenge for client side researchers to make the right choices and it’s getting harder because there are just so many more to choose from. Technology gives us a myriad of interesting new ways to elicit insights and we’re constantly tempted by shiny new techniques which promise to do things faster, cheaper, more innovatively. But, in my view, technology or innovation is only any good if it does the thing it’s replacing better.

So before we all rush off and commission our award winning, virtual reality research project, I wanted to make a stand for reality, and simple human conversations. I love that there’s so much innovation in our industry: I’ve embraced plenty of it in the past and will continue to do so. But there’ll always be room in my heart for the craft of beautifully executed, good old fashioned, flashing-light-and-technology-free qualitative research too.

Why we need to be nicer to our brand trackers

With every research job I take, my heart sinks a bit when I find out I’m going to have to look after a brand tracker. It’s not that brand trackers are in themselves bad things – there are many excellent ones out there based on solid thinking about how brands work. It’s just that businesses’ -and often clientside researchers’ - expectations of what brand trackers can do are verging on insane. I want that insanity to stop. Here are three and a bit things I’ve gleaned over the years from wrestling with trackers and being in the company of some really smart people who get brands.

Brands are like people: once they’ve been in your life for 20 years or more they’re unlikely to surprise you

If you’re an established brand in a mature market don’t expect your brand tracker to deliver exciting new insights every week/month/quarter. So don’t report on your brand that often. Brainjuicer once advocated asking people how they feel about your brand once a year. I’m sure not many marketing directors have had the courage to follow through on that one. But, back to the people analogy, think of someone you’ve known for a while. Have you changed the way you feel about them in the last week, month, year (assuming they haven’t commited some heinous sin)? They may look a little different than they did five years ago but I doubt much else has changed. The place brands hold in peoples' minds doesn't change much either so the cadence of your tracker should reflect the rate of change or dynamism in your market, and not the marketing world’s obsession with minute by minute data.

Brand trackers track brands NOT ad campaigns

Increasingly I hear researchers ask how they can tailor their tracker to measure all the different marketing channels their brand earns, owns or pays for attention in. You can’t and even asking the question suggests a fundamental lack of understanding of brands.

A brand is what results from every promise you make (marketing) and every promise you keep (your product or experience). Your tracker reveals the composite impact of all that effort but you can’t dissect it to a channel or product feature level. To attempt to calculate the impact of a social media campaign on your NPS score is tantamount to tracker abuse. If you really want to do that you need to invest in an econometric model. And even then it’s not an exact science because you can’t ignore the fact that creativity can play a pretty big role in a brand’s success

Trackers are actionable – but only if you set them up with that in mind in the first place

One of the most common complaints from my peers is that their brand tracker isn’t actionable. So they fire the agency. That’s usually unfair. The reality is most trackers aren’t set up with a specific business question in mind which makes finding “actionable insights” really rather hard. It’s a particular issue for some of the proprietary models offered by big agencies. I get why people like them: they’re intellectually robust, they offer norms and often trend data. But it’s unlikely any of them will be able to reflect the issues affecting your brand and market better than a bespoke approach could.

… which means you need to define your brand challenges and track those

The mantra for all quantitative research is, quite rightly, to work out what matters and measure it. Do the work up front and establish where you want to be as a brand. A good starting point is to identify the reasons why someone might use a brand in your category - territories or consumer needs if you like. Byron Sharp reminds us that the more useful things a brand can be associated with, the healthier it will be. And because those needs will almost certainly be at the centre of your marketing and product development strategy, track your competitive positions on those things

It’s hard to live without a tracker, they are our window on our brand’s world. So if you have one, be kind to it and respect its strengths but also its limitations. Just don’t expect it to walk your dog or empty your dishwasher. Although if you've come up with one that does the latter, let me know ....