Promotional events change traditional seasonality and strongly concentrate sales
Promotional events are gaining more and more importance across the whole world – and Latin American tech markets are among those showing the strongest impact. These events are changing traditional seasonality and concentrating yearly sales volumes in a few weeks. This is why it is of utmost importance for manufacturers to plan well and participate successfully in these events.
It is not only about Black Friday, but there is a multitude of different events, most of which are in Q2 and Q4. While Brazil focuses on Black Friday in November, following the US model, other South American countries have created purely online events in order to push online sales – the most successful ones are Hot Sale and CyberMonday in Argentina and Cyberdays and CyberMonday in Chile, which make online sales boom. Peru and Colombia are increasingly starting to follow these models. These “new” events take place in addition to the traditional ones, such as Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Christmas promotions, and in most cases outperform them. They even “outperform” traditional climate-related seasonality. For example, in Argentina and Chile, the second most important week for refrigerator sales is now in winter (off-season) and vice versa for washing machines.
Hot Sale Argentina: Boom despite macro challenges
With +29%, the market volume of technical consumer goods this year topped the 2017 growth during Hot Sale week, despite macro-economic challenges. The sales volume in Hot Sale week was more than double of the average week in Jan-Jun18, concentrating 8% of sales. With +84% growth, PTV was by far the most successful category, which can mainly be explained by the soccer world cup effect.
Cyberdays Chile: Beating records after records
During this year’s Cyberdays, the technical consumer goods market grew again by 20% (units), with small domestic appliances, consumer electronics and major domestic appliances growing above average. Small appliances growth is coming from vacuum cleaners (+54%). The Cyber events created the perfect platform for selling robots, which showed huge increases. One third of the robots’ sales volume in first half-year was sold during the Cyberdays week. The value share of online channel within total tech market in Chile soared to 20% in the first semester and even 59% in Cyberdays week.
Mother’s Day Peru
In Peru the traditional Mother’s Day remains the most important week in the year (equal to Christmas), with double sales volume compared to the average week in the year to date. Yet it also increasingly shifts to online. Although the product focus is slowly shifting, it seems as if many Peruvian women do not yet feel offended being offered home appliances for Mother’s day, as small and major domestic appliances showed again the highest sales peak. This year consumer electronics increased by 23% during Mother’s Day. This trend is seen throughout the whole year 2018 and it became stronger week by week. The main reason is obvious: After 36 years Peru qualified for the soccer world cup in Russia. In order to be able to follow well their “selección”, many Peruvians invested in new TVs.
Price, but premium!
Latin American consumers tend to be very price sensitive, which is why strong price cuts are key to success of promotional events in the region. This makes it very important for manufacturers to decide carefully how much to decrease the price, in order to participate successfully without sacrificing more margin than necessary. Most aggressive price cuts can be observed in Chile, with almost one third of all units sold with >20% discount.
However, the average prices per category often increase in promotional weeks, thanks to a strong push of premium segments. Especially during the online events, the share of ultra HD TV, ultra-thin laptops, wash dryers, side-by-side refrigerators or kitchen machines increased by up to 15 percent points, compared to an average week.
What’s next?
After all this recent promotional activity, it is not at all over. Important promotions are still coming at the end of this year, mainly from Black Friday and Cyber Monday, as well as Christmas promotions.
What is the best strategy to optimize your sales in these promotional periods?
The GfK Weekly Promotional Events Tracker helps you to figure out:
- How successful were we during the last event?
How did our competitors perform in that week and why? - Which is the most promising segment?
Which models should we use for the promotion? - How aggressive should be our promotion?
For more information, please contact us: [email protected]