It’s here. Thanksgiving week. Retailers, marketers and consumers are all waiting in anticipation for what are normally the busiest shopping days of the year: Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We focus on holiday shopping, travel, and a bit of creative inspiration for this week’s roundup of recent performance marketing, partner marketing, and digital marketing industry news, reports, and insights.
Where Will Consumers Do Their Online Holiday Shopping?
This holiday season, consumers will look to an array of places to do their shopping, and online will be a big destination for many. Two-thirds of affluent internet users in the US plan to visit one-stop shops like Amazon or eBay for their shopping needs, September 2016 research reveals as reported by eMarketer. Consumers don’t necessarily wait for Black Friday and Cyber Monday though. Data from Epsilon found that by the end of October, more than half of US internet users have already begun to cross items off their holiday shopping lists.
How Luxury Retailers Are Navigating Black Friday
According to Hilary Mines from Glossy (a Digiday publication), Luxury retailers are wise to turn up their noses to Black Friday’s dark temptations. While speculations that Black Friday is dead are overblown, the shopping holiday has indeed lost some of its appeal, mostly on the ground level. According to retail analyst company ShopperTrak, customers spent $10.4 billion on in-store purchases on Black Friday in 2015, a $1 billion drop from 2014. Still, as luxury retailers look to the holiday season as a time to pick up sales and in-store traffic, the noise around Black Friday can tempt high-end brands to jump in.
Why Bad Weather May Spell Good News for Marketers
When the weather takes a turn for a worse, it’s no surprise that many of us will start searching for winter essentials – from coats to umbrellas. But it also creates a ‘travel trigger’, as people look to escape the cold outdoors says Alessandra DiLorenzo, Chief Commercial Officer for Media and Partnerships, lastminute.com group in a MarketingTech post. This is an obvious marketing opportunity for airlines and hotels to grab with both hands – but beyond that, the travel trigger is also a lucrative shopping window for other brands to jump through.
