The aftermath of the February 28th retail boycott

February 2025

The title here is a type of pun on math   and how reporters spin the numbers to fit their agenda. It's a kind of nod to the idea lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Trying to make a boycott take off

On February 26, 2025, Betty Lin-Fisher, a consumer reporter at USA Today plugged the article she wrote for the outlet on LinkedIn thus:

This Friday, Feb. 28 is the one-day, 24-hour consumer economic blackout.

Consumers are encouraged not to spend money during the 24-hour period and if you need something, to buy local.
The Feb. 28 event is one of several boycotts planned by groups of consumers or activists to protest what they call corporate greed, companies that have rolled back their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and President Donald Trump's efforts to eliminate federal DEI programs since taking office.

 The Boomerang Effect Shown on Social Media

The comments showed that not everyone agreed with this approach, with many declaring that they'd make a point of shopping that Friday. Some added additional commentary on why they thought this was wrong. 

For example, Kimberly wrote this: 

I will go to Target and look for products by black businesses and purchase some. I disagree with this whole thing as it could affect those that have nothing to do with it. Treat people on merit and qualifications not race. Last I saw we've had a black President, VP, police chiefs, mayor's, governors I could go on and on into infinity. You can be anything you want to
be. Only one standing in your way is yourself.And Jan wrote:We should agree to disagree and give the current administration 2 full years to show American just what they will do for us. I may not have liked prior Presidents but I never wished harm on our working people. After 2 years, THEN speak up and change things with the Mid-Terms. However, I believe we will see our economy turn around over the next 6 months and no one will want to change anything! It's only been 5-6 weeks...... Wish for the BEST for our Country! We the People have spoken with our votes

What does the data show?

Now that we're in early March, the numbers should be in to let us know if the boycott had any significant impact. So let's see what Betsy Lin-Fisher had to say in her follow-up  on the first day of what  was intended to be a one week "fast" from Amazon purchases and a full 40 day "fast" (the correspondence with Ramadan has to be deliberate, as Lent only began today -- Ash Wednesday) intended to harm Target and Walmart in USA Today. 

She was forced to admit that rather than dent Amazon sales, as compared to the previous eight Fridays, sales were actually up 1%, as per Momentum Commerce. It doesn't appear she's getting this information first-hand but relying on Forbes reports, and the headline it used about Amazon on March 2 was Amazon Defies ‘Economic Blackout’ As Sales Climb During Boycott.

Lin-Fisher was willing to concede Amazon so long as she could claim Target. Again, that's based on a Forbes report: Target Loses Web Traffic As Costco Gains On Feb. 28 Economic Blackout Day The implication her is supposed to be that Costco, which did not yet make a statement about dropping DEI, is being rewarded -- as per an increase of 22% in web traffic and 3% in app visits [not sales but visits] --while the other evil retailers are being duly punished by a drop in traffic.

Let's now set aside the question of whether or not Costco benefitted from the boycotters' position, which actually contradicts their stance of avoiding all big retailers and buying locally instead -- and take a closer look at Forbes' figures for Target and Walmart., and I want you to notice something. Hint: it's in the calendar page that I used as the illustration for this blog.   

• On blackout day, Target website visitors dropped 9% compared to Friday, Feb. 14, from 5.2 million to 4.7 million.
• Target app user traffic, representing the most loyal Target customers, was off even more, down 14%, from 4.2 million to 3.5 million.
• On blackout day, the nation’s number one retailer, Walmart, experienced a 5% slump in web traffic, down from 11.7 million on Feb. 14 to 11.2 million and number two Amazon dropped by 2%, from 67.1 million to 65.9 million.

Did you pick up on my hint? Why are we comparing the 28th to the 14th? Wouldn't it make much more sense to compare the 28th to the 21st -- the closest Friday to it and one in which there was no special occasion that prompted people to spend billions of dollars on gifts? 

The NRF predicted a record-breaking $27.5 billion in spending for Valentine's Day 2025

SEe the illustration above of the level fs spending  about the sales predicted for this year's Valentine's Day that would include spending on February 14th itself -- given the last minute habits of many consumers. They would have been able to shop online at retailers like Walmart and Target and still pick up in store to make sure they'd have the expected token of love ready. In fact, a good chunk of Valentine's Day shoppers do make their purchases online as you can see from the graphic below:

 

Deliberately taking February 14th as the baseline to "prove" a significant drop in shopping traffic at Target and Walmart on an ordinary Friday is the equivalent of weighing yourself just after a Thanksgiving dinner and then weighing yourself a few days later first thing in the morning before breakfast and claiming you lost five pounds. Anyone who tracks weight accurately would always tell you to weigh yourself at the same time of day each time for the sake of consistency with your baseline. 

This tactic is known as stacking the deck, one of the logical fallacies you should have learned about it in a rhetoric course. 

Related: 

Everybody lies with visualizations

On Target

 

by Ariella Brown

Two years ago I wrote a blog entitled Fixing What Ain’t Broken at Target that criticized the proposed change to the retailer's tagline. I remembered it today when I saw that Target is still showing its original tagline in its circulars. Either it read my blog or heard many others echo its sentiments before committing to a marketing mistake. 

What a slogan should not be

Forgetting the wisdom of if it's ain't broke, don't fix it, Target is replacing " “Expect More. Pay Less,” the tagline it has been using with great success since 1984 with “What we value most shouldn’t cost more.”

As I pointed out at the time, while that sentiment is very close to the original brand promise of value for less, it’s actually far weaker. It is neither making a promise for the brand to deliver, nor is it coming up with a clear solution.

I remembered this when I came across the Target virtual circular. I'm happy t to report tht the tagline it shows is still the original rather than the monstrosity suggested in 2021.

What a slogan should be

Slogans are meant to be short, to the point, and indicative of a call to action.

When Nike declares, “Just do it,” they’re using just three syllables to not only capture a feeling but direct customers to act on it. Apple’s “Think different” did the same thing.

Unoriginal though it may be, the original Target tagline captured its mission statement with a clear CTA to customers in just four short words. It’s now being replaced by something much longer that sounds more like a complaint than a solution.

Related:

Think Marathon Rather Than Sprint When Planning Content Marketing

Most Memorable Brand Slogans

Make Your Content as Accessible as Possible

What Edison Can Teach Us About SEO

7 Ways to Grab Customer Attention in Subject Lines

CRO is Like Basketball

How this year's Black Friday is different

We made it November, and now holiday marketing is in full swing already. In fact, many marketers didn’t even wait until after Halloween to get the season started. 

The attempt to push holiday marketing early happens every year, and so Black Friday has evolved and stretched to pretty much all of November over the past several years. Yet there were always some holdouts who would for the super deals on doorbuster specials available in stores only on the day itself. 

Recollecting Past Black Fridays

That phenomenon is what prompted my father-in-law to get up before dawn to  bring home two play kitchens for his grandchildren. I don’t recall what price he paid, only that he believed the savings to be worth the trouble. 

It goes beyond saving $20. He enjoyed the thrill of the frenzied excitement surrounding Black Friday sale events.

As the National Retail Foundation (NRF) reported last year, “Thanksgiving weekend draws nearly 190 million shoppers, spending up 16 percent.”  That year online shopping outstripped in store shopping: 142.2 million vs. 124 million. 

There were always some traditionalists who like to see what they buy in real life and who expect better deals in stores. That’s particularly true of those of older generations who are loath to order online ever. 

New for 2020

This year, though, likely the figures will shift to more online shopping and more shoppers making completing their purchases before the big weekend still referred to as Black Friday.  The challenge for retailers will be not to lose out on the sales that shoppers would come into stores for at a time when people are still skittish about crowds.

However, adapting to the reality of life under a pandemic when many stores were closed for months forced even a lot of the old-school shoppers to embrace the ease, convenience, and safety of online shopping.

That shift is going to reshape Black Friday 2020. Even if stores wanted to revert to the old model, the concerns about rising cases this season and the general advice not to pack a lot of people together means there is no concentrated shopping frenzy at most retailers.

Read more in This is Not Your Father’s Black Friday

. 

Not Your Parents' Back-to-School Marketing

pic from https://images.pexels.com/photos/207658/pexels-photo-207658.jpeg?cs=srgb&dl=back-to-school-conceptual-creativity-207658.jpg&fm=jpg

While the heat of summer draws us to the beach, marketing campaigns pull us in another

direction – back-to-school season. Yes, it’s that time of year again, and today’s marketing campaigns must work with the expectations of parents -- and students – to be successful.

The back to school shopping season is a big deal for retailers. The National Retail Federation (NRF) estimates the spending for back-to-school shopping to hit $82.8 billion this year. That’s one of the highest on record.

According to a recent JLL Retail survey, low costs and wide selection are important factors to the majority (70 percent) of parents. They favor stores associated with low prices, ranking Walmart (50 percent) and Target (47 percent) among their top picks, and far ahead of Amazon (16 percent). Kids have substantial influence on purchases. More than 57 percent are involved in deciding which store to shop at, and specific items to buy.

Read more in 

Back-to-School Marketing Trends: It's All About Gen Z

Tailored and Targeted Marketing in the B2B Space

The problem facing B2B marketers is that they have not been given the same tools and capabilities available for B2C marketers to reach people on more than 500 channels available. That's because they don't have integrated data on the people they need to target, which hampers their addressable audience and reach.

The 2016 Forrester Report, “B2B Budget Plans Show That It's Time For A Digital Wake-Up Call," found that even though two-thirds of B2Bs indicated they would be increasing their digital budgets within the year, only about one-fifth considered their teams truly adept at leveraging data and insights for effective digital campaigns. 

Darian Shirazi, CEO and cofounder of Radius, a leader in connecting B2B data and intelligence spoke with me about the big challenge that B2B marketers have had in trying to target a CIO. 

Read more in 

Targeted Advertising for B2B

Mother's Day Marketing

Public domain pic at http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/pictures/170000/velka/muttertag-14609069654cp.jpg

Motherhood may be priceless, but there actually is a price tag associated with Mother's Day. Given that the market for this particular holiday is expected to hit a record-high this year, savvy marketers have already put their brands in the game.

On the second Sunday in May, Americans take time out to show appreciation to their mothers, typically with cards, flowers, dinners out, and other assorted gifts. All that adds up to $23.6 billion, according to NRF's forecast.

In anticipation of this substantial spending occasion, you'd expect to see massive marketing campaigns. But it seems that brands are not doing quite as much as they could. I popped into Target and saw only minimal signs of the imminent holiday represented by a few Mother-themed mugs in the front section, as well as the usual cards.

I shared what I've seen with Mike McMaster, VP of Lead Generation at JumpCrew. He said he noticed the same at a mall he visited over the weekend. With the exception of Macy's, he observed very little Mother's Day marketing.

The stores who fail to address the upcoming holiday in their setups are missing out on “the two Ps in marketing,” McMaster says. That refers to “placement and promotion” with targeted positioning of merchandise that ties into the promotional theme of Mother's Day.

Read more in Mother's Day: Price Tags and Hashtags

It's all about the delivery

http://aomc.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/logistics.jpg

I planned to write on this topic before the Target incident. But once it happened, I felt its inclusion really highlights how getting shipping right is so essential for businesses today.

When was the last time you paid for shipping? Some would have to think a while for the answer because so many of us select the "free shipping" options available for online orders.  In truth, though, shipping services are never really free. Their cost can be quite significant, particularly for businesses that that operate in the supply chain.
Shipping is lifeblood of a supply chain business.....

We can see the difference in delivery services from retailers who optimize their shipping and those who don't in our own experience.  I ordered a few items on Target.com on May 28. The email confirmation gave a range for delivery for all the items of June 3 to 5. June 5 arrived, as did some of the items, but not all of them. The UPS tracking information provided still showed June 5 as the date of arrival, despite a notation of a delay on a truck, as confirmed by a Target representative on the phone.  The UPS man who delivered part of the order assured me that there was no way another shipment would come before Monday.

His prediction turned out to be correct, and that was the only insight I gained from UPS, which failed to give me a new arrival time despite my request for information via email.  (Note: Both Target and UPS claimed to want to help when I tweeted about it, but only Target offered some conciliation in the form of a $10 gift card.)

Read more in 

Logistics Don’t Always Deliver Joy Thanks to UPS for inspiring the title with its own tagline

Marketing that misses the mark

Today I found a message in my LinkedIn mailbox that is so very off the mark, it's funny.It's from a company that "create[s] innovative marketing videos."

It promises, "No more endless pages of boring web content - replace all that with a play button, and give your clients a perfect sales pitch, every time."

The thing is, I don't like marketing videos. I much prefer to take in information through text. In fact, creating such texts is my job, and I work hard to make sure they are not "boring." So this marketing expert has proved himself to not be much of an expert about targeting. But there is no real harm done. I won't expose the name here, and the email cost nothing.

Keeping your identity

Clones, robots, alien shapeshifters, or disembodied consciousness take over people's identities in shows such as Star Trek and Doctor Who. They can then take over the lives of the people they've duplicated, particularly when they have access to their memories. How can anyone defend himself when he can't tell friend from foe?

In real life, most of us don't fear having someone else show up in person claiming to be us. But we are concerned about identity theft. Our digital world makes it all too easy for the bad guys to hack into personal information posted online, as well as financial information that we can think is secure. The cost of identity theft can be huge when hackers get access to our credit cards, debit cards, and bank accounts.

Read more in Your Personal Online Guardian

A kind of nutrition label for apps

Your mobile apps know a lot about you: what you buy, how you pay for it, what you browse, and where you are when you do it. To get some idea of just how much data is collected about you and who else gets to see it, click on Target’s privacy policy http://m.target.com/spot/terms/privacy-policy#InformationUsed. While that information on data collection is available, most customers probably never bother to check it.  The question is if a voluntary code of conduct for apps that summarize the information upfront will provide better consumer privacy protection.  The NTIA believes it can, but as it is something companies are not required to opt into, its critics regard it as a diversion from more effective legislation.

Rather like the nutrition facts label on food packages, the short notice on apps is intended to which reveal at a glance how much of what you don’t want in your diet is in it. Also like the packaged food industry, the voluntary code frees companies from a mandatory label that might rate its data collection policies according to a government standard.

Read more in Voluntary Privacy Policy Proposed for Mobile Apps

There's a parallel to the nutrition labels printed on packaged food. If there were a legal mandate, then all apps could have a point rating to reflect how privacy-friendly (or not) they are. But without that, it's up to companies to be self-regulating, as it were, and voluntarily decide to briefly show some of its data collection facts.

This week's Advertising Age includes http://adage.com/article/news/big-food-preps-50m-push-facts-front-labeling/243475/. The food manufacturer want to avoid having a legal mandate, so they are spending $50 million to promote what they call ad "Facts Up Front." The idea is that putting that nutrional summation on the front of the package will satisfy those who are critical of the way they have represented sugary cereals and such as sound nutritional choices without having to accept an offical label that is not within their own control like the grade system recommended by the Institute of Medicine. With such a label, the foods that contain more fat, sodium, or sugar than the benchmarks set for them would get no stars at all.