There’s a new promotional shopping day rival on the marketer’s calendar; Black Friday (not the stock market crash) vs. Cyber Monday. Which one do you go for? Or do you use both and hope you don’t cannibalize your sales? To introduce each briefly, Black Friday is the retailer promo the day after Thanksgiving. Consumers swarm to retailers that offer outstanding deals which usually brings the retailers out of the red and into the black (sales). Cyber Monday is the new online sales phenomenon that mirrors it’s offline contender, but targets consumers on their first day back to work. This new promotional day has been growing year over year. So here’s the problem–who and what are you as a retailer going to sell (to) on each day? You don’t want to offer a deal on Black Friday at Circuit City and then offer a better deal on the internet on Cyber Monday, but you have to grow the loyalty for that holiday somehow. So how do you do it? That’s up to everyone to figure out, but I do believe that over the next few years retail marketing departments will learn to predict which buyers are going to be most susceptible to buying certain products on the certain promotional days and optimal online/offline promotional mixes will be prevalent. Instead of contention, these 2 holidays have the potential to create very profitable holiday promo seasons.