Last week was a long holiday week, starting from wednesday till sunday. November 27th was the Thanksgiving day & November 28th was the Black Friday, in US. India doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving, however it is catching up with the American culture in terms of offering deals on Black Fridays. Weeks before Black Friday, advertisers started promoting themselves with Pre-Black Friday sales ad, Black Friday sales ads, and now that the Black Friday is over, Post Black Friday deal ads. The same holds true for Cyber Monday deals too!
The ads do not pertain only to the in-store purchase, but online purchase too. However, being a shopaholic that I am, I end up visiting mall almost every few days. Needless to say, the discounts/deals the brands offered were actually their existing deals. There was no added discount to any of the products.
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| Macy's October 2014 Ad |
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| Macy's Thanksgiving Ad |
It keeps offering the same deals around the year. And, honestly those deals are not even the real deals because the products are intentionally priced at unaffordable high price and then to promote themselves as a brand offering maximum discounts, they use high numbers.
So, coming back to Black Friday, I went to Macy's, despite knowing that there wouldn't be much difference in the pricing of the products. Sometimes, you just have little hope in your heart of getting extraordinary deals on the products you intend to purchase. So, I went to Macy's, all decked up with ads on Black Friday deals. The entire store looked decked up like an Indian bride in red attire. However, the bitter reality was that all the online and the physical promotion in the form of fliers, mailers, and leaflets among others was just a way to pull a big crowd during these holidays without actually offering a single "real" deal.
My point is that whether "real" or "hoax", Macy's, like other store brands earned almost ten times the footfalls, than it would on a regular day. Such promotional ads work brilliantly in fooling people!
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