Summary

• Retailers start planning months in advance for Black Friday. 
• Market context is necessary for retailers who want to truly understand how to enhance their performance. 
• Modern AI platforms have transformed the traditional manual competitive analysis process, enabling real-time adjustments to competitor strategies. 
• These AI technology platforms offer simplified market analysis, strategic assortment & price planning, and insights into effective promotion planning.
• Using EDITED’s AI-driven platform, PUMA UK achieved its most successful Black Friday in 2022, with a 15%-20% revenue increase.

Introduction: Preparing for Black Friday

What comes to mind when you hear “Black Friday?” For consumers, this phrase typically signals that it’s time to start holiday shopping. Consumers get excited about all the discounts and promotions their favorite stores offer. 

As retailers, however, you know that Black Friday is more than just one day or weekend a year. Planning for Black Friday starts months ahead of time, and promotions are communicated to customers weeks in advance. 

With consumers spending $9.8 billion in 2023, up 7.5% from 2022, retailers are preparing to tackle the busiest shopping day of the year and maximize their return in 2024. [1]

In an era of unprecedented retail competition and more data and insights than anyone can imagine, you must embrace AI technology to gain market context and stay competitive for Black Friday. 

Context Is Key: The Need for AI-Driven Competitive Analysis  

Over Black Friday weekend, retailers face intense competition, leaving no room for mistakes due to blind spots. Rather than solely focusing on what went well and what didn’t last year, successful retailers prepare based on their own performance data and real-time and historical competitor offerings. 

Traditionally, retail competitive analysis has been manual, requiring extensive resources and time. However, the game has changed with the advent of AI-driven retail technology. 

This technology provides insights into competitor pricing, promotions, and product placement and adjusts based on real-time and historical data. Having a window into the market can be the key to success on Black Friday, helping you stay ahead of the competition and appeal to your customers.

Understanding Market Impact on Performance 

According to Deloitte, the average American plans to spend ~$500 between Black Friday and Cyber Monday [2] and these customers have certain expectations about what offers they want to see. 

To create customer-centric assortments and promotions that meet this demand, you must understand what your customers are looking for. Some of the most common disappointments for shoppers over Cyber Week are that they aren’t satisfied with your discount levels or products on sale, or that the products they want sell out too quickly. [3]

Luckily, context from market research can help mitigate these concerns by providing you with a true understanding of what the most successful brands in your space offer and have offered in terms of products, pricing, and messaging. 

Making Data-Informed Decisions to Win Black Friday

AI-driven competitive analysis can help you make more data-informed decisions across your business to meet customer expectations. How?

1. Simplified market analysis: 
   • Analyzing the market is time-consuming and tedious, particularly during Black Friday preparations. Removing blind spots to understand what’s happening across key categories in your industry is imperative to gaining clarity of your performance in the context of the market. AI-driven platforms can process vast amounts of data to provide timely market insights, enabling you to truly understand how your offering stacks up, and ultimately find whitespace to win. 
2. Strategic assortment and price planning: 
   • Retailers like you can leverage AI technology to excel in assortment planning and pricing for Black Friday. You can see price distribution across categories, products, and competitors on Black Friday trends and align your pricing accordingly. Moreover, these platforms provide a valuable retrospective view, allowing you to review past Black Friday pricing and assortment strategies to pinpoint successes and areas for improvement. 
3. Effective messaging and timing: 
   • With AI-driven platforms, you gain access to ample competitive information, such as email communications, category landing pages, current and historical promotions, and more from thousands of retailers. Heatmap analysis can reveal when competitors started discussing topics like Black Friday, allowing you to identify optimal times to launch your own promotions. By clicking into specific time periods, you can examine the exact emails and website content competitors historically pushed out, guiding you on what and when to promote through promotion management. 

How PUMA Excelled on Black Friday 

PUMA’s UK team leveraged EDITED’s Retail Intelligence Platform to plan, adjust, and execute during Black Friday 2022.

PUMA faced time constraints in building, analyzing, taking action, and reviewing data during the critical trading period of Black Friday. The team needed to identify profitable products and customers and determine steps to maximize traffic opportunities for increased profitability. Moreover, they needed to understand competitors’ strategies and actions during Black Friday, including insights from previous years.

“…[With EDITED] we built a promotional dashboard to keep track of our Black Friday promotions on a category conversion level. We had the insights of what our competitors were doing that day, but we also had insights into how we were performing versus our own plan. And, throughout Black Friday, we made two to three significant changes to the products we were pushing on the homepage and the products we were pushing on email. And we did have our most successful Black Friday ever.” 

– Colette Hilton, Head of Retail and Ecom for UK&I at PUMA Group

EDITED supported PUMA UK in having its most successful Black Friday ever in 2022, driving a revenue uplift of 15%-20%. By harnessing EDITED’s market insights to create a contextualized strategic plan, followed by fast and precise profit-centric trading decisions, PUMA could effectively adjust its strategy and stay competitive.

Conclusion

There is a lot of opportunity when it comes to Black Friday, and incorporating market context ensures you don’t leave any profit on the table. To prepare effectively and stand out from the crowd, retailers must harness the power of AI-driven technology to get an accurate view of the market and contextualize their performance.

EDITED combines your internal business data with comprehensive market insights in one place, so you can quickly access the insights and recommendations you need. See how your pricing, messaging, and product assortment compare to other retailers, and determine how best to position your own Black Friday sale for optimized success.

Request a demo here to see how EDITED can help you make this Black Friday the most successful one yet. 

Sources: 

1. https://explodingtopics.com/blog/cyber-monday-stats 

2. https://www.retaildive.com/news/shoppers-black-friday-cyber-monday-spending-increase/637006/#:~:text=Dive%20Brief%3A,a%2012%25%20bump%20from%202021. 

3. https://business.adobe.com/resources/holiday-shopping-report.html