[1]If you live outside of the US, you might not know that this coming Friday (the day after the US Thanksgiving holiday – which always falls on the fourth Thursday in November) is the so-called Black Friday, when retailers pull out all the stops to get you started on your holiday shopping in hopes of moving out of the red and into the black.
A typical Black Friday scenario looks something like this:-
- Drag yourself away from the table after stuffing yourself with far too much turkey, cranberry sauce, cake pie, and other holiday goodness.
- Get in the car at around 10:30 PM.
- Drive to the Walmart/Best Buy/Target/Macy’s or other store that you have picked as your primary Black Friday target after carefully weighing its location versus the population of the surrounding area, and the outside temperature.
- Wait in line until about midnight.
- Push your way through hoards of other shoppers to get one of the 5 x $199 plasma TVs or $50 Egyptian cotton sheet sets (or whatever else) that the store has been advertising for 3 weeks, but hasn’t bothered to stock any more of.
- Leave with a sense of ultimate victory (if you’re one of the lucky few), or, more likely, a bitter taste in your mouth and a bunch of bruises from where you got crushed by the aforementioned hoards.
In short, it’s basically a combination of typical holiday shopping and American Gladiators [2].
[1]In the US the Monday after Thanksgiving Day has now been relabeled ‘Cyber Monday‘ – in the UK, this Sunday, ie. the Sunday before the US ‘Cyber Monday’ is typically labelled ‘Cyber Sunday’, Ed as it’s the day when everybody (ostensibly) goes back to work after the long holiday weekend, and proceeds to spend the entire day online shopping for deals.
It’s the more laid back, refined way to shop like a crazy person, even if its name lacks the pirate-esque panache of ‘Black Friday’.
Back here at WireSpring HQ we were thinking about how we wanted to approach this holiday season – normally a less-busy time than the August-November period preceeding it AND decided that consumer products companies shouldn’t have all the fun.
We therefore decided to do a Black Friday/ Cyber Monday deal of our own for our Digital Signage EasyStart product.
There’s precious little data out there on whether such short-term promotions work on B2B products (honestly, how many B2B “impulse purchases” have you made in the past 5 years), but we figured it’s worth trying out.
While I’m not normally a fan of discounting, I have to admit that if I were a business buyer, I’d be pretty psyched about getting a deal by just playing along with some silly American tradition.
In any event, if you or anyone you know does happen to be looking for a digital signage player or interactive kiosk for small networks, just click on the ad on the DailyDOOH site or click here [1], file an info request, and finalize your purchase by next Friday, and you automatically qualify for the deal USD 999 or (GBP 799 for those in the UK).
If not, it’s OK, I still like you. Just not as much as before.
So happy Thanksgiving to those of you in the US. And to everyone else, happy rest-of-the-week!