Barstool Sports on Black Friday

As you all know, Black Friday is a day in which people all over the nation go shopping, seeking to find the best deals on products of all kinds. Black Friday is a great marketing technique for companies or retailers to move mass amounts of products. By offering an enticing bargain on one product, they are able to get more customers into the store and many of those customers will buy other products as well, specifically complimentary products to the item being sold at bargained price. Black Friday sales are also used by companies to move excess products that they want to get rid of to make room in their inventory for the newer year's models.

Barstool Sports utilizes Black Friday sales to their advantage as well. Even though they sell products solely online, they are still able to move mass amounts of products. Dave Portnoy offered all of their merchandise at 20% off for 24 hours on Black Friday. The already popular T-shirt sales skyrocketed for that day. People were buying more products than they might have usually bought if there wasn't a sale. Since T-shirts are relatively easy and cheap to produce, Portnoy can afford to slash prices drastically for a short while in order to boost revenue.

Another brilliant marketing technique utilized by Portnoy was the fact that he was complaining about the sale all day long. He would say things like "stop buying shirts, I'm going to go bankrupt." This was a smart move because people began to tweet him screenshots of their order confirmations, and Portnoy would say another funny, sarcastic comment. These interactions on Twitter enabled Barstool to show potential customers who might have been on the fence all the various orders other people were purchasing. It is possible that if they saw someone spend $120 on two sweatshirts, a T-shirt, and a hat, they could justify themselves for buying a shirt or two.

As time was winding down on the sale, Portnoy tried to get a few last minute customers to buy a shirt. Portnoy tweeted things like "Only 60 minutes until this nightmare is over" and "not even gonna mention that Black Friday ends in 6 minutes cause I don't want to remind people they got 6 minutes left to murk me" in order to remind customers who were late recognizing the sale or someone who had been thinking about it all day. Portnoy was also able to get #prayforpres to trend on twitter, as people were tweeting this to support Portnoy's (pretend) bankrupcy. I'm sure these tactics were able to influence a few extra sales for Barstool Sports.