Shorter promotional events are fueling the spring sales season

When it comes to off-holiday sales events, short and sweet could be the future.

“The days of putting something on sale for a week or longer are going to be behind us,” Michael Brown, partner in Kearney’s consumer products and retail practice, told Retail Brew. “What they’re trying to do right now is keep engaging the consumer with something new, something different.”

Target offered a case in point this spring sales season when instead of running promotions for a full week under the name Target Circle Week, as it had the previous year, sales were concentrated into a three-day period dubbed “Target Circle Deal Days.”

Though rivals Walmart and Amazon stuck to weeklong events this year, Brown said there is increasing pressure on brick-and-mortar retailers to offer more “rapid-fire,” shorter promotions to compete with online retailers that can change their deals on an hourly basis. There is a “new cadence of promotions,” he added, that is more “proactive” and “fast and furious.”

Widening the benefits: Historically, sales were more concentrated around the winter holiday season, Tamara Charm, partner at McKinsey, told Retail Brew. But then roughly a decade ago, Amazon started running big sales in the spring, summer, and early fall, setting an example for other retailers.

“Consumers spend so much in the last quarter,” she said. “Retailers would love to have that spread over the year.”

What exactly that should look like, however, is still a matter of debate. There is a lot of experimentation right now, Charm said, as retailers face “trade-off between those big events and day-to-day personalization.”

More personalized: Charm framed it in another way: as a balance between the kind of deep discounts offered on tentpole deal days, like Target Circle Deal Days or Amazon’s Prime Days, versus more tailored or personalized promotions that might change on a week-to-week basis.

The downside of getting this balance wrong is that retailers could lose money by offering discounts to shoppers who probably would have shown up anyway.

Target, for its part, is also looking at doing more personalization in its promotions, and even pinpointed this spring as a time for experimenting with that approach.

“We’ve seen real traction with personalized games and rewards,” CEO Michael Fiddelke told shareholders in March. “So we’re expanding our focus on personalized rewards this spring.”

Early Easter: In the meantime, Brown noted that retailers fared relatively well this spring despite Easter landing early in the season: “What I’m hearing from people is that demand was good, but there was limited time for consumers to really shop,” he said. “It seems to have snuck up on people, so we’re seeing a lot of motion right now to liquidate what didn’t get sold.” In his view, while the spring season is important, the real moneymaker is summer and back to school, and these liquidations are making room for that next batch of inventory.