‘Super-aggressive’ Black Friday deals help spur late demand for consumer electronics
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Dec 2, 2008 at 10:00pm
Consumer interest in HDTVs, digital cameras, laptop computers and GPS receivers staged a late surge in advance of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, according to November data from the Retrevo CE Index, a publicly-available index from Retrevo that maps daily trends in the consumer electronics (CE) industry across 40 categories and more than 4,000 products by price and demand.
While consumer intent to buy electronics products remained unusually weak industry-wide through the first half of November, consumer interest in HDTVs, digital cameras, laptop computers and GPS receivers jumped significantly heading into the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, according to the Retrevo data. By Black Friday, interest in HDTVs had surged by more than 250 percent compared to what it was at the beginning of November.
The products and retailers with super-aggressive pricing were drawing the most interest from consumers. For HDTVs, Sony and Sharp HDTVs at Sears, Samsung and Sharp HDTVs at Circuit City, Emerson TVs at Wal-Mart and Dynex TVs at Best Buy were among the products garnering the most attention on Retrevo. Kodak and Olympus had a good showing in digital cameras, while Apple got the most interest in the laptop category, followed by HP and Lenovo.
“The sudden late surge in interest in consumer electronics heading into the holiday weekend was a positive sign for the industry, given the poor overall outlook for CE products for the season and low demand earlier in November,” says Vipin Jain, president and CEO of Retrevo. “While people are clearly looking for the biggest discounts, hopefully the research and deal hunting they are conducting using Retrevo will translate into a merrier-than-expected holiday season for the consumer electronics industry.”
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
