Preliminary results from The NPD Group’s The Anatomy of Black Friday study show that the aggressive pricing posture taken by the CE industry appears to have paid off. Significantly more tech shoppers were driven into the stores (or online) by the prospect of a great, desirable product at a great price. Almost 65 percent of tech purchasers bought in 2011 because they saw what they really wanted on sale. In addition, 28 percent were enticed by the big sales available at the specific retailer where they were shopping. Both of those numbers were approximately 50 percent higher than the overall population of Black Friday shoppers and 10 percent higher than last year.
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After doing much of the cooking for my family’s epic Thanksgiving dinner, I wrestled with the prospect of going out into the cold November night to meet up with 600 of my closest electronics buying friends. My curiosity, however, got the best of me and I ventured out after my family had long gone to sleep. As we all know, Black Friday starts earlier and earlier each year and this Thanksgiving night, around 11pm still smelling of pumpkin pie, I set out to hunt for bargains. I visited my local Best Buy and Walmart– strategically mapped out near my home to avoid the inevitable traffic jams.
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With stores opening their doors on Thursday for Black Friday sales this year, our annual Black Friday retail adventure encompassed a much wider swath of time and space then we have covered in previous years. The end result was some surprising insights and some, what we hope, are interesting observations on how this change has impacted Black Friday.
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Tags: Apple, Best Buy, Black Friday, hhgregg, Office Depot, Radio Shack, Target, Toys R Us, Walmart
Consumer Technology | Stephen Baker, Vice President, Industry Analysis | 
1:43 pm | 
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As I’ve noted when discussing the e-reader market, Amazon and Barnes & Noble have an inherent advantage in garnering overall revenue given that they can call upon databases of millions of active book-buyers. When I wrote about the in-store Nook angle that Barnes & Noble was taking, I mentioned how electronics retailers could benefit from this level of integration. Last week, prior to the Google TV announcement, Best Buy announced it will offer its version of Sonic Solutions’ RoxioNow video program under its original CinemaNow brand, which Best Buy has acquired.
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This week brought news that Walmart has purchased Vudu, a one-time on-demand video device company that transformed its business to servicing connected TVs and Blu-ray players. As the largest seller of packaged home video in the country and one of the largest sellers of consumer electronics, Walmart clearly has an interest in maintaining its position as more video is consumed digitally, but also in establishing ties to the televisions and Blu-ray players that are featuring the Vudu service.
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Apple creating a stripped-down $99 iPhone for Walmart would be more than just counter to the way that technology products, particularly cell phones, usually proceed in the market. It would be an unprecedented move for modern-day Apple, which has avoided retailer-exclusive SKUs except those in its own Apple Store (the Project Red iPod) and has historically striven for simplicity in its product line. Particularly with the iPhone, Apple has been so focused on preserving the level of user experience that it went weeks with low or no inventory of the original iPhone model leading up to the launch of the iPhone 3G.
There’s little doubt as to why Walmart would want to carry the 3G iPhone. NPD tracked the device as the best-selling handset in the U.S. in Q3, surpassing the Motorola RAZR in a dramatic consumer embrace of Web-savvy smartphones. Recent smartphones such as the T-Mobile G1 and Blackberry Storm already represent the second wave of would-be “iPhone killers” following advanced touchscreen feature phones that appeared earlier in the year.
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Today is Black Friday, November 28, 2008 - the traditional start of the holiday shopping season - and for what seems like the 100th time (although it is only about 10 times) I awoke early and trudged off to the shopping malls and power centers of Northern Virginia to check on the health of the electronics business. While we won’t know how successful these sales were until December 8th, when NPD’s weekly data is released and we deliver our annual Black Friday shopping report later that week, as well as update everyone through our joint Black Friday webinar with DisplaySearch, I am here to tell you that, based on my shopping this morning, and other reports already trickling out, that our fears that Black Friday would fall flat are likely overblown.
The collapse of sales and consumers’ expectations over the last eight weeks (as well documented in NPD’s weekly tracking service data and the NPD Consumer Technology Holiday Snapshot Report) has been swift and scary. The key question for today is whether that decline can be arrested by the deep discounts and shopping excitement that Black Friday has traditionally brought.
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