Consumer Searches Slow for Black Friday Deals, But Grow For Cyber Monday, Says CEA

Reversing a trend, the number of Google searches for Black Friday deals did not hit new highs Thanksgiving week -- but they did increase the week before and early this week, according to a report delivered via webcast by CEA research director Shawn DuBravac.

Cyber Monday deal searches were up 104 percent this week from 2009, and they had been up 64 percent the prior week, DuBravac said. Cyber Monday, a term coined by the National Retail Federation’s Shop.com division five years ago, is “still a new event,” DuBravac said, but it has become synonymous with deals and discounts after Black Friday. He speculated that some consumers were hoping to find Black Friday pricing on Cyber Monday deals without having to go to stores.

Black Friday, meanwhile, continued to expand its reach as a sales lure. “Apple even got involved” this year, DuBravac said, citing limited discounts on iPad and iPod products. He reported a Craigslist seller posting a piano with a Black Friday-only price of $500. One of the resulting risks for the electronics industry of a ubiquitous Black Friday is “crowding out,” DuBravac said. “Every category is getting involved in Black Friday,” he said, so consumer attention will be pulled “in a variety of directions.” He noted that appliance company Dyson held a Black Friday promotion for vacuum cleaners last week and that 20 percent of Black Friday shoppers were looking for appliances. In coming years, he said, “We're going to see more buying in adjacent products and categories."

CEA worked with Market Source to find out what salespeople had seen in stores Black Friday. Computers, TVs, gaming products and digital cameras were the top-selling tech items, they said, and it remains to be seen how far heavy sales of TVs went toward reducing bloated TV inventory. The industry entered Black Friday with inventory levels of TVs “a bit higher than we would want,” DuBravac said, saying the “dust was still settling” on TV sales for Black Friday weekend and it isn’t clear whether Black Friday pricing must carry through the month to spur significantly increased sales. He called TV inventory “the most pertinent inventory question” and “something to watch closely."

A CEA Black Friday survey of 1,262 adult consumers found that 40 percent bought a video game accessory, the leading category of tech purchases. Despite weakness in sales of game consoles over the year, the number of consumers who bought consoles on Black Friday rose 8 percent, DuBravac said, driven by next-gen accessories like Microsoft’s Kinect motion controller, which reportedly sold 2.5 million units in its first 25 days. Smartphones saw a sales jump to 16 percent of shoppers from 6 percent, an atypical result for Black Friday because of the service contract required with a purchase, DuBravac said. E-reader sales, too, saw a boost, jumping to 13 percent of tech purchases from 2 percent in 2009, CEA said. Music docks and portable music systems dropped from the previous year, according to the survey, with only 15 percent of customers surveyed having purchased a system. The CEA report was based on a telephone survey Friday to Sunday among two national samples including 629 men and 633 women 18 and older.

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday reported as successes, the industry is looking warily at the remaining four weeks of the year to see whether Black Friday-style pricing continues. On average, according to CEA research, consumers planned to have completed about 20 percent of their holiday shopping over the Thanksgiving weekend. DuBravac said early shopping was about “more than finding deals and going out for early bird discounts” and also about “getting shopping out of the way early.” He said TV prices are likely to “continue to drift lower as we move into season,” but he doesn’t expect the 25-30 percent discounting seen last year.

Deals alone could have been what drove consumers with incomes to $50,000 back into stores Black Friday after a notable pullback last year, DuBravac said. He said 38 percent of consumers in that income bracket shopped over Black Friday weekend versus 27 percent last year. The increased number could have “strong implications for the macro environment and what to expect for the fourth quarter,” he said. But, he warned, those shoppers could “go back to retrenching” after getting deals “while they could be had.”