BLACK FRIDAY:
A HISTORY OF THE MASSIVE MARKETING EVENT
Did you know that the first mention of Black Friday as a shopping day following Thanksgiving was in a 1961 Philadelphia public relations newsletter that used the term to refer to the traffic problems created on the post-turkey day Friday and Saturday? Or that Cyber Monday, the new kid on the holiday shopping block, was coined in 2005 after the industry realized that shoppers who couldn’t, or just didn’t want to get involved with the Black Friday frenzy would make a noticeable boost in online shopping the Monday after Thanksgiving? Makes sense, I guess...don't you think so?
Although some say that Black Friday is a dying breed of a sales day, Adobe research found that Thanksgiving and Black Friday beat out Cyber Monday for consumer deals, and a GOBankingRates study from 2014 revealed some Cyber Monday deals are "so 'unimpressive' that the day doesn't even deserve its own name." ...Ouch.
Lest, Black Friday isn’t going away by any stretch and it’s still a key shopping day for many retailers as well as an event for many consumers. Some retailers like REI have announced they're not opening on Black Friday this year, giving their employees a paid day off and even starting a #OptOutside social media hashtag campaign encouraging people to share what they are doing on Black Friday instead of hitting the stores that will in fact be open today.
These few and oddly interesting tidbits are merely a snippet of the many factoids of Black Friday history that David Kirkpatrick put together over at MarketingDive.com
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