The big marketing brains have always heavily emphasized that the key to selling a product lies not in its price or quality, but in the media’s capacity to generate a need to buy it. Black Friday is no longer just an American thing, as loads of other countries have adopted this shopping ‘holiday’ at a dizzying rate over the past three years. This year it seems to have reached its zenith, with the nature of the tradition distorted into a media circus to exhaust the patience of any sensible consumer with the atrocious level of advertising saturation.
A quick look at Google Trends stats shows the international impact of Black Friday: United Kingdom, Puerto Rico, Hungary, and Spain are the countries with the most most related searches. In Spain, the absurdly high initial estimates found that some 54% of Spaniards planned to go shopping on Black Friday, with an average spend of €202. What looks like a ridiculous figure actually makes some sense in view of the endless number of businesses that have jumped on the Black Friday bandwagon. The €600,000 in sales from 2014 seems like it will be a drop in the bucket compared to what’s to come, and the same occurs in other countries. Nothing can stop the discounts!
BLACK FRIDAY SEARCHES 2015
And here’s the Top 10 countries ordered by search volume:
- United States
- United Kingdom
- Hungary
- Puerto Rico
- Spain
- South Africa
- Denmark
- Canada
- Ireland
- Norway
Adobe estimated that the U.S. saw $1.7 billion in sales JUST ONLINE on THURSDAY ALONE. Considering that last year more than $12 billion was spent during the entire Black Friday weekend, it seems this year it’s likely to be much more.
One in five Twitter messages currently mentions the subject, and your correspondent’s inbox is overflowing with advertising, even for companies that have almost nothing to do with retail, such as banks and insurance providers. Everybody wants to be on the bandwagon for a day that, essentially, is nothing more than another replica of the many shopping ‘holidays’ throughout the rest of the year -at least outside the States-. The marketers always win!
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