With all these Thanksgiving day and pre-Thanksgiving sales, I wonder how much longer Black Friday will actually mean anything?

She asks a very provocative question? Absolutely is my answer. Here’s why:

Consumers embrace it- Despite all the machinations to the contrary consumers respond to Black Friday.  My visits to various malls at 0 dark 30 Friday saw lines forming outside doors.  News feeds from around the country illustrate that was not just a Silicon Valley phenomena

Reminder- Serves as an anchor in the calendar -There is no question that retailers have made concerted efforts to draw the Black Friday frenzy into early November.  Perhaps the two best examples are Sears with their “Black Friday Now”  ad campaign that kicked off Halloween weekend and BestBuy posting all their circulars through Christmas on their website thereby giving people confidence in when the best deals are to be had.  But the key here is the pivotpoint is still Black Friday.  That serves as the launching point.  It’s a dramatic reminder for consumes to get about the important business of holiday shopping.  That is  =not going to change for the foreseeable future.

Publicity, publicity, publicity- You’d be hard pressed for find a news outlet that didn’t have a reporters covering Black Friday activities.  There is clearly huge interest in the idea.  I monitored various news feeds where retail shopping stories dominated the day. Local radio stations provided traffic updates and I would venture to say every single news station had a reporter doing a standup at a mall with harried shoppers in the background.  Retailers will always capitalize on the free exposure.

Not your fathers Black Friday -I’m comfortable that Black Friday and probably Cyber Monday are here to stay for the foreseeable future.  But what is changing dramatically is how retailers utilize the day.  I believe this year saw the emergence of retailers use of social media to drive marketing strategies.  Many of the examples were interesting, innovative and fresh.  But next year social media will not sneak up on anybody, including the consumers.  Next years campaigns will try and draw the consumer into a tighter dynamic with the retailer.  Black Friday will serve to focus these efforts. 

See ya next year at 4:30am!

Monday Oct 12

10-11        Client Meetings
11-12:30   International Expansion Strategies
1-3:30       Retail General Session
4-5:30       Crisis to Opportunity
7-10          Retail Reception

Tuesday Oct 13
7-8:30      Breakfast Meeting 
9-11         Client Meetings
11-12:30  Customer Centric Retail Strategies
1-2          Client Meetings
2:30-4      Client Meetings
 
Please feel free to pass along any good retail stories I should look into. My Twitter ID is JeffPR

My latest dive into social media has been experimenting with Twitter.  Like Facebook I didn’t get it at first. Twitter is a site that focuses on microblogging.  If you think it, you can post it in 140 characters or less. But now a whole two weeks later I really see this as a marketing tool with great potential.  Just go to Twitter and search on the term retail.  What you get back is a raw slice of emotion, the good the bad and the ugly.  Obviously at this time of year retail is on everybody’s mind.  You bump into people microblogging about their thoughts of being laid off, of the horrors of dealing with the public and of interacting with retail associates that have clearly been pushed past the brink. Occasionally people actually having a good time during the holiday season.  Fascinating stuff.

Below are a few of my favorites, with names removed.  Just think how much information is communicated in a few characters.  Yah at this point this is pretty basic stuff.  But my bet is by year end 2009 every Tier One retailer will have a social media strategy in place.  We’ll see.

• only in MN: camo Santa hats.
• I think lots of marketers have trouble understanding Twitter b/c they try to be interesting rather than try to be interested.
• We have two inches of snow and the news is acting like we already have 20″. At least it got them to quit talking about the economy.
• is off today and wondering where the day went. Probably the same place as last weekend. and lost socks?
• Today I was nice to two retail folks when nobody else was. By my math, this earns me two unspeakable cruelties for next week. Amirite?
• Just saw another BEAUTIFUL west TX sunset. About to brave Wal mart-pray for me
• Finished 1/3 of Christmas shopping this afternoon. Braving Wal-Mart later tonight for the rest. Pray for me. LOL
• God help me, I’m actually thinking of descending into retail hell the Saturday before Christmas. But if I go now, it won’t be bad, right?
• My iPod headphones have died but there is no way I’m going near any retail locations for at least a week. I’m in terrifying silence!
• one of the last four people left in a once-thriving retail headquarters office.
• Working retail during the X-mas season has made me feel like the lovechild of Ebeneezer Scrooge and the Grinch.
• Trying not to let working retail ruin my holiday spirit…it’s hard
• Eating a subway sandwich, after braving vast Wal Mart crowds in the name of motherhood, apple pie and Santa Claus. Does Santa work this hard
• Temp Store at the mall called Man Town. It’s like I was in a beer commercial.
• We now have a 8′ tall inflatable hunter complete with camo vest and shotgun in our front yard. Thank MIL and Cabelas. (sigh)
• surrounded by people saying “im in line at rei right now” into their phones
• Christmas is so close and I’m not done shopping! Running out of ideas for gifts.
• Oh good.. I work at a large retail store on the last weekend before Xmas. This will be interesting.
• Wow. Snow, fresh baked cookies, lemon cello,I finished my Christmas shopping AND Christmas movies on TV? THIS is the life.
• Done Christmas shopping!!!

Let’s all hope for and work hard towards a better 2009!

Jeff Roster

Twitter ID:  JeffPR

]]> http://blogs.gartner.com/jeff_roster/2008/12/24/holiday-shopping-experience-2008-from-a-different-twitter-perspective/feed/ 1 http://blogs.gartner.com/jeff_roster/2008/12/22/leave-it-to-retail-to-solve-the-reply-all-problem/ http://blogs.gartner.com/jeff_roster/2008/12/22/leave-it-to-retail-to-solve-the-reply-all-problem/#comments Mon, 22 Dec 2008 23:28:24 +0000 Jeff Roster http://blogs.gartner.com/jeff_roster/?p=74 How many of us have dreamed of coming up with a solution for the pesky “Reply All” problem.  Don’t know what that is? Lucky you.  Here’s the scenario:  Someone gets an email and because they think their answer is: A. either so witty or B. executing a CYA flanking maneuver they hit “Reply All”  with their answer.  Thus forcing everyone in the company to deal with their response whether they need to or not.  This is a bad situation only made worse by having to perform an archaeological dig through layers of responses dating back to the Mesozoic Period to see if in any way possible your are involved.  Ultimately this is a monumental time sink for all.

I’ve often asked my friends at Microsoft if there can’t be something built into Outlook that only allows a person to do this so many times before an alarm goes off.  Yes I know there are times when it’s important to do this.  I spent the afternoon of 9/11stuck in a hotel room in Boston going through the many hundreds of emails bouncing around Gartner.  It was quite an experience to read the thoughts of analysts on 4 continents from many different religions or no religion coming to grips with that tragedy.  Serious business indeed.  I’ve also spend a morning reading the very funny responses to an analyst that thought it would be a kick to send an “all company” email asking for responses to the question, “you know you’ve traveled to much when?”  By the time I booted up on the west coast I had a hundred or so responses and new ones were coming in about once a minute.  Yes many were hysterically funny but it was not a productivity boom that day.  Fortunately being in the publishing business we were able to turn that little miscue into a booklet.  My favorite answer being:

Your room key won’t work in the door.  The person inside comes to the door in a bathrobe, thinking it is room service.  Suddenly, you realize that the room number is the one from the LAST hotel.

I actually lived that one personally. I just thought I was getting old.  Glad to know other analysts have had similar experiences.

So what did a clever retailer do to solve this problem you might ask?  Take a gander at the below link

Cathy Replied All

And lest you assume that the folks at Zappos don’t have fun with everyone that enters into their domain, think again.  Take a peek at the link to see how they treat a poor hapless analyst that stumbled into a tour of their facility.  I’ve been on a lot of store and facility tours ranging from the utterly fascinating to boring beyond belief.  But I’ve never seen anything like my site visit at Zappos.  As we moved from department to department we were cheered.  To be quite honest it was startling at first.  Then the light bulb goes off and you begin to understand the culture.

So why do I find this so fascinating?  There’s clearly a passion about the business with these folks that you don’t see all that often anymore.  The reason they can do this kind of thing and most of us in our organizations can’t is because they recruit people that have a similar passion.  That kind of over the top behavior is what’s expected.  You know it going in and you respond to it when it happens. We as consumers are drawn to that kind of energy. They prove the point you can be high performance but have high fun.  It would be my wish that more retail executives would look for opportunities to instill fun and enthusiasm back into their businesses in 2009.  Perhaps a return to the roots of retail is what’s called for to fix the ills now affecting our industry.

I’ve gotten to know Timothy through our mutual efforts on the Retail ROI Initiative.  No it’s not about technology payback.  ROI in this case stands for Retail Orphan initiative where we both serve on the Board of Advisers.  We both are avid bloggers. Timothy’s deals with the world’s orphans and you are reading my efforts.  We’ve also connected on Linkedin as well as Facebook.  I was just riveted to my mobile device checking Facebook again and again over Thanksgiving.  That was the vehicle that Timothy was using to keep people updated on his status.  OK Jeff so nice story but what does this have to do with technology or retail?  Well Timothy and I have never met face to face or even been on the same conference call.  But between all the various Web 2.0 connections we’ve established with each other we’ve exchanged an awful lot of information and have developed a relationship.  I’ve spoken often to executives forty years or older about the need to understand these new communications channels.  Some get it but many are far more skeptical.  I always suggest they walk by any middle school to see kids texting each other.  Hopefully they see what I do, a completely new communications strategy emerging.  It’s my hope that retailers understand they will need to develop new communications channels to communicate with this generation.  But it wasn’t until Mumbai did I realize that even curmudgeons like me have adopted these new channels of communication.

So if you are a retail executive or a technology and service provider working in the retail industry and are not experimenting with these technologies I would venture to say your view into the future of retail will be very limited.  Retailers need to understand how this connected world we are all living in will impact their business, both pro and con.  Imagine how one negative customer experience can literally roll across the world.  The key here is it won’t play itself out on nameless faceless blogs but via very personal comments passed from friend to friend.  That, I believe, is a very  powerful 21st century version of word of mouth.  I can personally vouch how quickly these virtual relationships can develop. How are you going to respond to these rapidly developing channels?  I might suggest you start with a Facebook page.