Quiet high street on Black Friday due to last-minute change-of-mind, IMRG / Toluna survey finds
Store visitor numbers may have been low on Black Friday this year due to multichannel shoppers (those who would usually consider shopping both offline and online on the day) making a last minute decision against visiting the high street, according to IMRG and Toluna.
A survey of 1,000 people run on three consecutive days – Thursday 26 November (‘before’), Black Friday 27 November (‘during’) and Saturday 28 November (‘after’) – tracked Black Friday shopping plans.
The surveys found that 7% of people planned to shop ‘in store only,’ and 21% of people reported that they would shop ‘online only,’ and these numbers remained consistent across Thursday, Friday and finally post-Black Friday, on Saturday. Conversely, 17% said that they planned to shop both online and in-store on Black Friday, but only two-thirds (11.5%) of these actually said they had done so in the Saturday survey.
There was some good news for retailers in that 44% of respondents said that they planned to spend more during the Christmas shopping period compared with last year.
Andy Mulcahy, editor at IMRG, said:
“Black Friday seems to be an event with a strong capacity for surprises – last year it was the scale of interest, this year it featured deserted shops despite many opening early in anticipation of a large turnout. This survey suggests it was primarily the people who would usually shop online as well as in-store that opted to avoid the early morning crowds, potentially influenced by the images of scuffles in stores from last year that were widely broadcast the night before Black Friday. Having empty shops on a key shopping day is clearly not in retailers’ interests, so next year campaigns may have a greater multichannel focus to redress the balance of traffic between online and high street.”
Paul Twite, managing director, Toluna UK, said:
“Consumer behaviour changes quickly, and real-time access to consumer sentiment lets companies look beyond the numbers and understand why their customers act in a certain way. Shoppers that thought they were going use both instore and online channels around Black Friday clearly decided to ‘avoid the crush’ in such numbers that stores were left empty. The good news for retailers is that planned spend is higher for Christmas 2015.”
