Diluting and Confusing Is Hardly A Smart Holiday Marketing Strategy

We’re the all-powerful marketing team and when we say that something is a deal, then it darn well is.

Unless it’s not.

The slow-pitch, knock-it-out-of-the-park prediction was that mobile would set sales records Black Friday (whenever that is – more on this is a second) and Cyber Monday. More have smartphones, brands have made mobile a focus, mobile web sites aren’t buffering like they did on BlackBerry devices in 2005, and we’re a society that craves convenience. Or is lazy.

Or both.

What seems to have caught many by surprise is that much like a giraffe is a giraffe even if we tell others that it’s a rhino, Black Friday is a day. Not a week. Not a month. Heck, someone might try to call all of 2015 Black Friday.

Except that it’s foolish to extend a dedicated shopping day to a longer period and then to whine about a dip in Black Friday sales. Ummm, you asked them to buy on what everyone else calls a Monday. They were done by Friday – or didn’t believe that the “deals” were few and fleeting.

We might look back and say that extending the “special days” to longer periods made sense because overall sales were up, but it strikes me as dumb to have a Black Friday sale commercial during an NFL game two days after, ummm, Friday. And who’s to say it won’t continue next weekend?

If I’m wrong, let’s just say that Christmas lasts six months. Then we’ll have to read about Santa getting tired due to 182 consecutive days of chimney entrances and the kids will be bored by having to open presents when they could be playing spring-time Little League or soccer.

Here are some other things that caught my eye at the traditional start of the holiday buying season (which now begins in September, by the way):

The hyping crowd pointed to mobile’s advances in light of Best Buy’s online and mobile web outage on Black Friday. But did it say more about a lack of proper preparation from the shopping giant?

As background, according to company spokesperson spokeswoman Amy von Walter, "a concentrated spike in mobile traffic triggered issues that led us to shut down BestBuy.com in order to take proactive measures to restore full performance.”

Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter (maybe a hipster) told CNBC that the outage is a testament to Best Buy's traffic, and a testament to the fact Amazon is never down.

"This shows how hard it is to manage a website when it's busy, but props to Best Buy for being busy," Pachter told the financial outlet. "Their Black Friday deals are quite competitive."

Still, the attention given the problem did not serve Best Buy’s’ interest.

Said one consumer via Facebook: "Well, after a good few hours of setting up what I'm gonna get for my first potentially amazing Black Friday..... you crash. If you intend to be one of the leaders among sales in technology and electronics. ....... maybe, just maybe you should know how to run tech."

Separately, we’ve heard about the tablet slump/demise/near extinction, but tablets outperformed mobile phones for sales. Marketers, take note.

According to IBM: for the first time, online traffic from mobile devices outpaced traditional PCs on Thanksgiving Day. Browsing on smartphones and tablets accounting for 52.1 percent of all online traffic. Overall Thanksgiving online sales were up 14.3 percent compared to 2013.

Black Friday online sales were up 9.5 percent year-over-year with mobile devices accounting for one-in-four of all online purchases.

Smartphones drove 34.7 percent of all Black Friday online traffic, more than double that of tablets, which accounted for 14.6 percent of all traffic. Yet, when it comes to mobile sales, tablets continue to win the shopping war – driving 16 percent of online sales compared to 11.8 percent for smartphones, a difference of 35.5 percent. Tablet users also averaged $126.50 per order compared to $107.55 for smartphone users, a difference of 17.6 percent.

And all tablets aren’t created equal - iOS once again led the way in mobile shopping this holiday season, outpacing Android across three key metrics on Black Friday:

Average Order Value: iOS users averaged $121.86 per order compared to $98.07 for Android users, a difference 24.3 percent.

Online Traffic: iOS traffic accounted for 34.2 percent of total online traffic, more than double that of Android, which drove 15 percent of all online traffic.

Online Sales: iOS sales accounted for 21.9 percent of total online sales, nearly quadruple that of Android, which drove 5.8 percent of all online sales.

(article first appeared on imediaconnection.com - http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2014/12/01/diluting-and-confusing-is-hardly-a-smart-holiday-marketing-strategy/)

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - Have the 2015 Black Friday Sales Started Yet?

Have 2015 Black Friday sales started yet? One day turned into one week in 2014. Why not one year?

Seriously, merchants can call them what they want and try to convince us that the deals are as good as those offered the day after Thanksgiving, but it’s going to take more than words to change behavior patterns. The stats show that we made record Black Friday purchases on, ummm, Black Friday.

Safari only holds a 5% share of the desktop browser market, but 45% share of the mobile browser market thanks to iPhone and iPad usage.

For the first time on Thanksgiving, mobile drove more than 1/2 of all online retail traffic, says IBM.

Several studies show that half of mobile users abandon a page if it doesn’t load in 10 seconds, and three out of five won’t return to the site.

People are now spending more time with mobile devices than with television.

80% of mobile retail research ends with a purchase, per Telmetrics.

41% of millennials will make mobile purchases while shopping in brick & mortar stores this holiday: Dynatrace.

Around the globe, the most popular tactic for the 40% of marketers using mobile this holiday season is SMS, according to Experian.

70% of retailers invested significantly in a mobile-optimized site in time for the holidays: shop.org.

By 2020, 90 percent of the world’s population aged 6 years and over will have mobile phones: Ericsson.

Stop the madness – I heard the term beacosystem for players in campaigns involving beacons.

Amazon was set to release new deals every 10 minutes on Cyber Monday with exclusive offers for mobile app shoppers.

Stupid tweet and headline on TheStreet.com – “Black Friday made it crystal clear -- mobile shopping has emptied our malls AND outlets.” Repeat after me – there are no absolutes in mobile or most anything else.

Twitter is reportedly experimenting with a mobile tool to help you determine the quality of your tweets. Isn’t that the job of your followers and others who look in?

Apps drive the vast majority of media consumption on mobile, accounting for approximately 7 out of every 8 minutes: comScore.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - The Pre-CES Edition

As I head to CES, I wonder whether 2013 be the year of "reinvented" TV or was that 2012 with second-screen adoption?

Consumer Reports calls the iPhone 5 the worst of the top smartphones. I don't know many unhappy users. Do you?

Next-generation LTE chips are said to reduce power consumption by 50 percent. Will that lead to 50 percent more activity and the status quo?

The dumbphone may be added to Oxford English Dictionary – but not by marketers. We would never call users dumb, right?

Facebook mobile user counts revealed: 192 million Android, 147 million iPhone, 48 million iPad, 56 million Messenger.

In 2012, mobile search and display advertising was up 220 percent in the U.S. alone, according to eMarketer. Google had a 56.6 percent share of the overall US mobile advertising market. The nearest competitor, Facebook, had an 8.8 percent share.

Texting activity went up and game playing went down on mobile in the latest comScore look.

Want an easy way to lose me? Run a headline that says a company "may" do something. I may move to Tahiti. Maybe not.

Apple stock was up 31 percent in 2012. Failure?

We couldn't end 2012 without another "gadget caught fire" story. Historically, many are hoaxes that media chase anyway.

There will be more and faster Internet connections on planes if the Federal Communications Commission gets its way. With an option, many of us will go-go from Gogo.

New York introduced real-time arrival times for subway trains via mobile apps. It can handle 5,000 queries per second.

Smartphone activations typically outpace tablets by four to one, yet more tablets were activated on Christmasm according to Flurry.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - The "What's Cooking" Edition

Visits to allrecipes.com from mobile are 40 percent of total traffic, up from 8 percent a year ago. That makes sense - you’ll find devices used in kitchens and shopping aisles. And folks go to them day after day, unlike many apps that get downloaded, then forgotten.

Headline: Coming in 2013 – Targeted TV Ads. A century after television was invented, you wonder how "mass marketing" made it this long.

24 percent of cellphone owners say the worst thing about them is they make you constantly available and reachable at any time: Pew. It’s simultaneously the best and worst thing, IMO.

On Black Friday, Groupon’s mobile transactions were up 140 percent, 4X a normal Friday A.M. That’s a lot of eyelash enhancement sales.

Mobile LTE subscribers are expected to double by 2014. That means more mobile video consumption.

Mobile app sales are projected to exceed $30 billion this year, 2X to 2011. The death of apps has been greatly exaggerated.

In 2012, mobile accounts for 10 percent of sales and 20 percent of new customers for HSN, the 26th largest retailer.

Of course, it's too soon to know, but you have to wonder if marketers view mobile differently now vs. before Black Friday and Cyber Monday numbers came in large. How can they not, if they are paying attention.

Samsung is the latest to be under scrutiny for factory working conditions. We want our devices, but not at any cost.

In 2008, 25 percent of cell owners used their phone to access the internet. Now: 56 percent, according to Pew.

Embark, a free public transit app, was downloaded 100,000 times after the Apple Maps were revised/screwed up.

Are you mobile shopping if you have you are on phone but don't buy anything? Analysts disagree. I say yes, just like if you go to the mall and come away empty-handed.

iPhone 5 is down to a week shipping time. That’s good compared to where it's been but bad because it’s unavailable on demand more than 2 months after launch.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - The "Free" Smartphone Edition

Forty-four percent have gotten a "free" smartphone in exchange for signing a contract, according to J.D. Power. What’s the play for the carriers and handset manufacturers? Subsidies drive adoption and increased spends on services.

Nearly 30% of emails are opened on a mobile device, according to a new report. That’s massive volume. Now the question is how many of those are mobile optimized?

I’m surprised that live blogging didn’t begin days before the iPhone 5 announcement. Then Ryan Seacrest and Joan Rivers can interview influencers entering the event on a red carpet.

If rumors are right, iPhone buyers will be saying "I want my LTE".

The only surprise in Amazon’s decision to give consumers an opt out on new Kindle Fire ads is that it took a reversal rather than was something that was stated in the new product introductory comments.

It turns out that the Nokia Lumia 920 image stabilization video was a “simulation” – what a way to start out on the right foot. It’s kinda like when what is positioned as real-time isn't real time. Bogus.

There was a major story about a company that is developing apps for as little as $20. Some have looked at this and called the work really mobile websites. Either way, this is supposed to be a winner for brands?

Samsung sold 20 million Galaxy S III devices in three months. By comparison, one forecast says 10 million iPhone 5s will be sold in the first week.

The Federal Communications Commission said that it is testing mobile carriers data speed claims. The best scenario is that we plainly are told what we have with comparisons.

Apple has reportedly failed in contract negotiations with cable companies around Apple TV. No one believes that this is the end of the story.

According to Pew, more than half of app users uninstalled or decided to not install an app due to concerns about personal info.

Nearly one third of cell owners have experienced a lost or stolen phone, especially young cell phone users (18 to 24), according to the same group.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer: The Confused Consumer Edition

Almost half of U.S. consumers think 4G LTE is unnecessary. Consumers don't know 4G from 9E.

One more: the average smartphone owner uses less than 2GB of data: NPD Group. Few know what that means and what they should buy.

Walmart spends $12 million a second on cashier wages. How much could it save if shoppers scanned and paid with a mobile app?

Headline: Fake iPhone 5 Available For Only $8. Me: lower we sink.

On the same road, a poll asks whether the iPhone 5 is ugly. What's ugly are posts of supposed pictures that are - or are not - the new device.

I hope that you enjoyed the weekend quiet before the blast that will be Smartphone September. New devices, unreal hype.

Twitter advertisers can target users by their interests. Despite what you see in my photo, I don't want eyelash enhancement offers.

51 percent think stormy weather affects cloud computing. Don't rain on their parade.

With the ISIS mobile payment service finally debuting 18 months later than first planned, wallet hysteria will pick up.

My take on the Mobile Marketing Association’s study saying that mobile should be 7% of the marketing spend rather than the current 1%? Helpful, but brands will determine this - how much and when.

Smartphone users view The Weather Channel app multiple times for "right now". Tablet owners view it less frequently and look more long term.

More than 50 percent of Hearst’s digital audience will access via mobile next year.

Two thirds of mobile devices shipped in 2016 will be smartphones. There is always a difference between shipped and bought.

Of course, it makes sense that Nokia will announce new mobile phones before the iPhone 5 announcement. It won't make a difference.