As I was watching the varying reports on Black Friday come across the news over the weekend, and the chatter of Cyber Monday followed, I began to wonder how much of this was just good promotion versus the hype typically associated with these events, especially Cyber Monday. One of the foundational tenets of Cyber Monday is that employees will use their organizations’ high-speed access to shop online. However, I can’t help but think that high-speed access has become commonplace in the home and even on smartphone devices like the iPhone and Blackberry. So why wait till Monday to shop - unless it is only for a price break that is available only for that day? Therefore, my vote is that while Cyber Monday may be a great sound bite for the media and a great promotion for retailers, it no longer has much to do with a shortage of Internet access. What do you think?
Is Cyber Monday Real, or Just Another Promotion?
December 1st, 2008 · 2 Comments
Tags: Web and CRM
2 responses so far ↓
1 Lydia Leong // Dec 1, 2008 at 5:09 pm
I suspect that the Monday spike now has more to do with the fact that many people are spending Thanksgiving weekend doing offline shopping and family things, and therefore not sitting at the computer doing online shopping. I think there are still some people shopping from work because they don’t have high-speed access at home, though.
Akamai’s retail index and Alexa’s traffic graph for Amazon.com seem to indicate that traffic is fairly strong today, but how that’s going to translate into sales remains to be seen…
2 Mike Prosceno // Dec 2, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Hey Gene, its most definately promotion! While I understand the fact that the economy needs consumer spend and traditionally the holiday season represents a very large chunk of that spend — I find the hype associated by Black Friday and Cyber Monday to be the “ugly” underbelly of the holiday season. Not because it exists but for how it is missued.
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