Black vs. White: Referring to Black Friday in Jordan

Abstract

This study investigates how retailers in Jordan refer to Black Friday when they advertise their discounted products during the end-of-year sales. Black Friday is a culturally loaded term as it is the day following Thanksgiving, and it is semantically loaded with negative connotations historically rooted in superstition. The data were collected from various retailer stores in Jordan which started advertising discounted products around the last week of November of 2022. The sample was randomly collected and consisted of 115 advertisements. Further, semi-structured interviews provided complementary qualitative data. The sample was linguistically scrutinised seeking various terms used to refer to Black Friday. The main focus was on whether or not retailers in Jordan kept the phrase ‘Black Friday’ or changed it to suit the target Muslim Arab locale. The terms were classified into various categories and analysed linguistically trying to find the different factors playing roles in choosing alternative names for Black Friday. The results show that 58% of the sample retailer stores used alternative names for ‘Black Friday’ in order to appeal to the local target potential buyers whose culture neither celebrate Thanksgiving nor consider Fridays to be black or unlucky. In other words, most retailers in Jordan replaced ‘Black Friday’, which is historically loaded with negative connotations, with more positive terms, such as ‘White Friday’, ‘Blessed Friday’ and ‘Smart Friday’. The results also show that English was the dominant language in the sample advertisements as 45% appeared in English only, 25% in Arabic only and 45% in both.