Jimmy Kim explains why stretching Black Friday sales across six weeks kills the urgency that makes them work. When customers know discounts will stick around for weeks, they stop buying now. He recommends going back to a tight five-day window with sharp offers instead.
The start your BFCM promotion earlier advice is no longer working, and it was actually starting to hurt BFCM. 5 years ago, I think it was good advice because of all the people we had, COVID, the pandemic, everything going on. To get ahead of the noise, it was what you had to do to run early access win early November and capture demand before competitors.
It worked for a while because most brands were launching their stuff for BFCM like Black Friday morning, but now brands are starting BFCM promotions I'd say like late October, give or take. Some are even running like their Black Friday preview sales 4 or 5, maybe even 6 weeks. And by the time that Black Friday actually hits, dude, customers are exhausted.
That's exactly right. We've stretched this 1-week event to this 2-month ordeal ultimately. And the process we train customers is to wait. They know if they don't buy in early November, the same discount's going to be available in mid-December or mid-November, and which kind of kills the entire point of urgency. It was the biggest black lever was supposed to pull the urgency one, right? But urgency always has magic for BFCM and we killed it by extending the window. You kind of take the hot approach, which is to tighten the window with sharper offers. Black Friday week through Cyber Monday, 5 days strong offer with real urgency. And you don't run these 6-week BFCM campaigns.
