Given all the media-hype and sector noise surrounding Black Friday this year, what was the reality? How did consumer behaviour compare to last year?

In conjunction with Toluna, global online community panel specialists, we polled over 1,600 consumers to repeat our 2013 Black Friday poll (2014 results are shown below).

In summary, awareness of Black Friday is now virtually universal (93%; +9% points), and as also reported this week by the likes of Amazon, JLP, Visa Europe and Walmart, most of the strong increase converted to retail sales (21%; +7% points).
Interestingly, the level of negativity associated with the ‘Americanisation of our society’ has risen too (34%; +7% points) and this is skewed sharply by age from a quarter of 16-34’s to almost one half of 55+’s.

Tomorrow, we’ll publish the results of our 2014 Cyber Monday poll, but you do have to wonder, what will be the impact of Black Friday, Cyber Monday and pre-Christmas Day discounting on traditional ‘New Year’ sales? – time for another poll or two methinks!
Black Friday Results