If you think that the French days are the National Days of France, you are wrong. Indeed, the French days are a new weekend of discounts.
What are the French Days?
The French Days are a weekend of discounts invented by 6 brick and mortar and cyber-shops: Fnac, Rue du Commerce, La Redoute, Cdiscount, Boulanger, and Showroomprivé.com. At these 6 names starting roster, some other companies like Camaïeu, Conforama, and Rakuten (PriceMinister) have joined the movement. The first version has taken place from 27th April to 1st May 2017.
The idea was to set up a kind of French version of the Black Friday: the discounts concerned all types of products: TV, clothes, video games…
Amazon has also hurry up to take part of the operation by offering a 10 euros discount for every 50 euros or more order.
Was this event worth it?
In total, the event has gathered 200 shops. The 6 stores at the initiative of the event have recorded 43 million of visits during the 5 days of the operation. Rakuten (PriceMinister) have seen an increase of 45% compared to the last year.
However, this increase is by far lower than the increase during the Black Friday. Indeed, during the Black Friday 2017, Rakuten has seen an increase of 400% compared to the average of November 2017.
This lack of interest for the French Days compared to the Black Friday is confirmed by the price comparison website “Idealo”: the number of visits of Idealo has the increase of 22% during the French Days against an increase of 112% during the Black Friday 2017.
It can be explained by a rushed communication: a survey lead by the YouGov Institute show that only 6 Frenches out of 10 was aware of the French Days.
Moreover, no common logo was planned for the event: every shop had its own logo.
Despite this lack of interest, the Twitter hashtag French Days was very active during the operation with 238 000 mentions.
The main problem of this hashtag was the negative opinion on the event of the big part of the mentions. Indeed, the 2 biggest complains of the customers was the low discounts and the roster of products (products too old…).
These 2 problems result in a low number of sales: according to the YouGov Institute survey, only 15% of the respondents have bought an item with a French Days discount.
How to improve the French Days?
The French Days organizers have already planned a second version of the event for 2019.
To improve the results of 2018, the planners must enhance the communication by starting it earlier (most of the communication started only 2 weeks before the event) and provide a common logo for all shops.
The second point to improve is the discount on the products: these discounts need to be bigger and not only limited to old products: in this type of event, people mostly want to buy a modern techno product.
If the French Days wants to become the French version of the Black Friday, this event will need the ways to pursue its ambitions.
