Market Track: December 2011
Following a wild ride during Black Friday, the last month of the year in 2011 saw most retailers maintaining similar levels of promotional activities when compared to 2010. The majority of advertisers either saw slight increases in circular and page counts or stayed flat. When looking at both page counts and circular drops overall there was not much change, with a 2% decrease in number of pages and a 1% drop in number of inserts per market.
There were only a handful of advertisers like Best Buy, Sears, Lowe's, Kroger and Kohl’s that decreased flyer circulation this year when compared to December 2010. However, not all of them followed the same pattern in terms of page counts, with Best Buy and Sears increasing page counts by 19 and 15% respectively.
Target, Kmart, Toys "R" Us and Walmart adopted the similar promotional strategy of increasing both the number of pages and the number of flyers.
CVS, Home Depot, Staples and Safeway did not change their frequency of flyer drops. Staples and Safeway did increase the number of pages per flyers, whereas CVS reduced the pages per flyer by 11%. This was mainly due to a four-page flyer in the week of 12/25/2011 instead of 16-page flyer in the same week previous year.
Home Depot did not advertise much in the month of December, very much like last year neither they increased the flyer circulation nor did they add extra pages to the flyer.
It’s important to note a number of factors that should be considered when examining the number of inserts and pages retailers send into the marketplace. Market Track’s granular level of data reflects regional versioning and market specific differences. This is accomplished through an extensive collections process, including physically obtaining the ads from the various markets in which they are distributed. In the instance that retailers send additional circulars to a limited number of markets, Market Track’s information reflects these nuances through numbers with decimals (for average number of inserts per market) and odd numbers (for average number of pages).
About Market Track:
Market Track is a market intelligence firm dedicated to increasing customers’ returns on their promotional investments. Through innovative technology and marketplace expertise, they monitor and analyze over 200 U.S. and Canadian markets for every channel of trade in order provide retailers and manufacturers with superior tools to monitor promotional activity, support dynamic decision making and turn information into market intelligence. For more information, contact Market Track at 1.800.235.3781 or e-mail [email protected].