Something changed in the marketing world two weeks ago. The starter's pistol signaling the beginning of the traditional Christmas shopping season fired four hours earlier this year. Traditionally, retail stores have opened their doors around 4 a.m. on Black Friday and enticed the Christmas shopper with all kinds of early deals. This year that tradition was challenged by a new marketing idea. Due to the sagging economy and increased competition, retailers began the shopping season four hours earlier. At the stroke of midnight, doors were flung open to the waiting hoards of consumers swarming like locusts on any deal they could find. Those stores that kept the traditional 4 a.m. opening time found that shoppers were scarce. Those people that had camped outside their doors in earlier years were done with their shopping and home in bed by the time the clock struck four.

There are a couple of marketing lessons to be learned by the Black Friday 2011 experience. First, it is not just important to give your customers a good product at a reasonable price, but timing in marketing becomes pretty crucial. There is a time the customer prefers to make a purchase - and the market can be pretty fickle about this. In the post Black Friday polls, shoppers said they preferred staying up on Thanksgiving Day and shopping rather than getting up early on Black Friday and hitting the stores in the pre-dawn morning hours. This idea worked with the consumer, therefore, it is the new way all stores will operate from here on out. It should be noted that there were some stores that kept their doors open all Thanksgiving Day. However, this idea was rejected by the customers. They were busy with the traditional Thanksgiving Day activities. That marketing idea failed. In your dealings with your customers, they also have a preferred time to purchase. It may not be centered around a holiday shopping season, but there is a right time and a wrong time to market to your customers. If you get your advertising in front of them at the right time, make your best pitch or get a sales rep talking to the client, you are likely to come away with the sale. Approach them at the wrong time and they will put you off. (Take a look at our article Purchasing cycles: the art of good timing in marketing) 

The second marketing lesson has to do with your competition. If you don't change your marketing methods to meet the challenge of your competition, they will bury you. And those changes are based on the way the consumer prefers to purchase our products - or in this case - the time they prefer to shop. It is questionable which retailer came up with the midnight opening idea first. It does not really matter. Those stores that recognized that if they did not make this change they would be at a strategic disadvantage and made the change were rewarded with sales. Those that did not lost sales on the biggest shopping day of the year. Likewise, when your competition makes a shift in their marketing, take note. If it has any traction with their customers, you must also change or lose market share. This is where your marketing plan (and I would recommend having one) needs to be a document with some fluidity to it.

Along those lines, I would toss this caution your way. If your competition does make a change in their marketing strategy, make sure it is working before you change too. In the case of Black Friday, there was research that was done by consumer marketing groups to find out if customers would really come to the stores at midnight. This was not a total guessing game on the part of the marketers behind the idea. For instance, if your competition decides to purchase ad space on the sides of semi-trailers, you might want to wait to see if that has any impact on the market before you spend money on rolling billboards. But be prepared to move if such an idea begins to take off. There is an old saying in marketing: there are no new ideas, just stolen ideas based on what is working now. We tend to use what is hot for the moment. Marketing ideas have life cycles. They trend in and trend out. Make sure your marketing is matching the up trend and turn loose of the things that don't work any longer.

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Black Friday midnight openings: No going back by Thomas Lee and Wendy Lee. Star Tribune, November 26, 2011