Here We Go!

Your friends in the trade industry are ready for their Super Bowl. They want you to sell at 60% off, they want you to increase your marketing budget by 60%, and if you don't increase your sales you are an idiot. They'll write all about it. That's how they make money.

You're going to hear all sorts of comments ... hourly diagnostics ... "At 11:00am EST Black Friday is trending 3.43% below last year. Marketers need to react immediately to these trends if they want to reap the rewards of this critically important season."

Utter gibberish. All of it.

You sell the way you want, when you want. Do what is best for your business. You are under no obligation to do what an "expert" at Woodside Research tells you to do.

Two stories. The first one I've told you previously. I'm sitting in a meeting on Cyber Monday with an Executive Team. It's 8:30am. The CEO is at the head of the table. A non-descript individual walks in, whispers into the CEO's ear, then hands the CEO a small piece of paper. The room sits in silence. The CEO turns to the room, and in a graven voice says "Brand X is at 40% off for Cyber Monday. We have to remain competitive. Effective immediately, we will be at 45% off." The Marketing Executive says something along the lines of "our email blast goes out at 9:00am, we cannot react that quicky". The CEO says something like "oh yes we can", causing the Marketing Executive to head out of the conference room with hair on fire. It's moments like that that your service providers / vendors are not compensated properly. The email was delivered, at 45% off.

The second story is about a smart client of mine. I analyzed the future value of customers who purchase on specific days of the year, after controlling for the quality of the customer purchasing. Two of the worst days to generate business? Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. Customers purchasing on those two days were so much less valuable than customers buying during other times of the year that you could practically shut the website and stores down those two days and be more successful during the rest of the year. This brand chose to not discount on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Sales still came in the door. Those sales were much, much more profitable, however.

You probably already run the query to see how valuable customers are in the next year based on the day customers purchase merchandise. You probably already know you'd rather generate an incremental order on April 27 than November 27, much less an incremental order on November 27 that is at 40% off.

If you don't run this query, send me some data and I'll run it for you for the low cost of $1,800 (kevinh@minethatdata.com). It's a Black Friday / Cyber Monday special for you!