People tend to have a unique love-hate relationship with Black Friday. The crowd is annoying, the environmental impact of binge shopping makes you feel guilty, yet most of us find it hard to resist. We were curious whether these contradictions came up in the online discussions while we also examined the most successful campaigns, as well as the reputation of the event itself.
Our analysis picked up 5 countries: Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania. We started analysing the online mentions of “Black Friday” in these areas on the 1st of November. The amount of mentions we found had revealed huge differences between the countries. Although, since we are talking about states with varying size of population, this is not unusual.
Altogether, the expression ‘Black Friday’ was mentioned 102 789 times.
We were surprised by something that was common for all the results: the reputation of Black Friday turned out to be insanely good. Honestly, we didn’t really expect too much enthusiasm after all the articles and reports about the ecological dangers of overconsumption. When we examined the mentions in the press only, we could actually see a drop at every country’s report. Criticism was very much present in articles. But the social media posts and comments widely praised it everywhere so that lifted the overall opinion drastically.
Let’s see the reasons why people like Black Friday so much!
THE DEALS
Needless to say, the main reasons for joy are the good deals and offers. We examined in every country what the most frequently mentioned topics are in connection with Black Friday. The top three topics were more or less the same. Expressions like discount, shopping and sale were present everywhere.
‘Discount’ ‘reduction’ and 'offer' appeared 10 970 times in the conversations, finishing as the most often mentioned topic throughout the whole Black Friday season. However, people were less likely to exchange ideas and tips regarding good deals or sales. The popularity of the words is thanks to the excessive social media marketing of shops and brands. It was the same in every countries’ case, despite the words appearing on all of their topic toplist.
‘Shopping’ was mentioned 6 432 times. Here the texts that mention Black Friday connected strongly to the sale and discount related mentions and the case is the same here: this big amount of mentions came from social media promotion.
It is true for both cases that almost 100% of the posts contained highly positive expressions like “must have”, “amazing”, “awesome” and so on, hence the very positive reputation of Black Friday online.
EFFICIENT ADVERTISING
So, as we could see, marketing is key because it can really turn around one’s online reputation. And just like always, power was in the hand of big corporations. In many cases, the same international companies turned out to be the most significant ones on the market during this period. Media Markt, Apple, Amazon or Emag excelled pretty much everywhere.
The key to success could be that their campaigns were unified. Media Markt launched a coupon giveaway on various social channels where participants had to engage with the game via comments and it generated almost 1000 mentions, Amazon applied the good old PR campaign so they were covered by the press very positively in multiple countries in the region.
One thing is for sure: despite lots of people say the point shifted from electronic gadget deals to general sales and price reductions, we can still that the focus is still mostly on electronic shops everywhere.
COUNTRY-SPECIFIC FUN FACTS
And now let’s see some interesting details from the countries we examined!
- In Austria, "streaming" became one of the top connecting topics with 933 mentions, due to a massive Twitter campaign of YouTuber Tisi Schubech
- In Bulgaria, phonearena.com turned out to be the most active website regarding Black Friday
- In Hungary, there is a saying goes like "every Hungarian person's favourite word is "free". Well, the expression "free things" finished as 4th on the most frequently mentioned attributes chart.
- In Poland, Black Friday campaigns started kicking off the latest: most brands started advertising only a week earlier, around the 24th of November.
- In Romania, every 4th mention came from a blog. Who said that online journals are dead?
Share:
