'A Black Friday black hole': Why Brits turned their backs on shopping anarchy

There were oceans of clothing rails marked with Black Friday discounts and percentages written on posters all over the walls as if Rainman had been let loose on Illustrator but there were no crowds around them. It was as if amongst the hype the industry had generated internally about the event, we’d neglected to tell the public.

I tried a few more stores and supermarkets, just to check the first hadn’t been some sort of Black Friday black hole, but they were all in a similar situation.

Far from the madness I’d read about last year, they were simply how I’d expect a Friday a month before Christmas to be.

Across the press and social media, people were reporting similar things nationally. The most indicative of which was a pair of grinning checkout attendants at an empty PC World throwing their hands in their air with bewilderment at why people weren’t breaking their door down at 6am.

So where had everyone gone? Out of the £1.6bn spent on the event, £1.1bn looks to have been online sales, up 30 per cent on last year. Black Friday’s anarchy has never really fit British shopping culture, there are no organised queues for a start, so it makes sense that it starts to become a more refined, organised and extended shopping experience. And a lot of the strategies this year reflect that stronger service message.

Argos has spread its sales across every Friday in November, along with delivery incentives. Dixons tactic of investing in its digital frontline, rather than in manning the barricades in store seems to have paid off with a 53 per cent increase in hourly traffic compared to last year.

And finally Asda, of course owned by one of Black Friday’s founding fathers Walmart, pulled out of the event entirely this year instead choosing to cut prices by £26m in the weeks leading up to Christmas, with chief executive, Andy Clarke saying ‘customers have told us loud and clear that they don’t want to be held hostage to a day or two of sales.’

Plenty of ads continued this theme of distancing themselves from the legend of the event. A fantastic KitKat print ad separated the product from the day’s mania, with a simple barcode above the famous slogan.

Parcel hub, Doddle harnessed its USP as a differentiator with the line ‘No hassle and no elbows in your face.’ Curry’s cleverly riffed ‘Enjoy Black Friday without the black eyes,’ and Aldi was proud to say it doesn’t do Black Friday and that, in fact, it has low prices all year around.

My absolutely favourite Black Friday promotion was a mystery Target store worker who placed posters around the shop advertising ‘Free falcons’ and ‘Hot gifts for centaurs’. Placed on Tumblr, the posters were probably not signed off by marketing but generated a huge social pickup.

I’ll come clean… I’ve always hated the idea of Black Friday anyway. It feels a little disingenuous for retailers to offer such deep offers for one day only, as if lifting the lid on the huge margins made the rest of the year round, and then still trying to ask you to believe in the item’s quality. And I don’t think I’d be the first that questioned whether that compatibility fits British values.

Instead a tactic of trust building, utilising low prices over a more extended period of time seems a technique more suitable to the UK market and will almost certainly lend itself well to clever online campaigns in the next few years, which blend the self-aware thinking of the Target work with more campaignable assets.

By losing the rush and extending the event over the whole of the second half of November, they will provide opportunities across social media to build appreciative audiences that can be activated at later dates.

Rob Remington-Drake is director and head of content strategy at Brave Spark