Where next for seasonal retail marketing campaigns?
Christmas isn’t just Christmas when it comes to retail — it’s a retail season that runs from Black Friday all the way through to the end of the New Year sales. With it comes all the retail marketing campaigns including the festive fragrance and toy commercials. How can we avoid buying gifts, gifts and more gifts if TV spots, radio AND our social media are repeating us, again and again, “you MUST buy this item for your mother”?
In the space of just a few days, the colors throughout the advertising landscape become gold, green, silver, white, and red (from our bank account too) and we will all run to the stores and log-in to Amazon in order to grab those bargain gifts. Let’s be honest, what matters the most at this time of year is the quality of the food BUT this is not what we are talking about here.
Christmas time and the beginning of the year with the upcoming sales are pretty intense moments for both advertisers and consumers. Brands could not survive if they did not orchestrate a relevant communication plan, especially a great digital one. Indeed, It is becoming increasingly difficult to create a call to action on the internet when all advertisers are using the same messages.
People need to understand that Christmas and the sales periods are NOT original.
Indeed, we have seen golden stars GIFs and “Buy 2 items and get a 30% additional off” since the beginning of time. Of course, some brands such as Coca Cola with its iconic version of Santa Claus, do not need to make any effort because they are pioneers. However, others have to define new strategies to meet their client’s expectations.
Indeed, the January sales and Christmas are, in the minds of consumers, a defined period of the year where brands must provide discounts, special offers and giveaways. When a customer is a member of a loyalty program, he is waiting for a special commercial gesture. He wants his favorite brand to show him some special attention and reinforce in his mind that this is still the brand for him — and it has to be better year in, year out.
As an example: in Paris every year, the tourists and locals are used to seeing the beautiful shop windows on the Grands Boulevards and the gold illuminations on the Champs Elysées. Everybody has something to say about it and they will talk about it. Especially if it does not meet their expectations — expectations that are getting higher every Christmas. It can become very frustrating for consumers when those lights are not as beautiful as they were dreaming of. It will probably be worse still if they start to compare with other places. Advertisers and marketers need to understand that when it comes to this kind of messaging, many people react the same way.
This is where digital tools could be the brand’s best friend.
For several years, digital marketing allowed retailers and the food & beverage industries to add new perspectives to their marketing activities during these really powerful periods of the year.
JouéClub, a French toy retailer, took as its weapon of choice, augmented reality. It invited the magic of Christmas to come alive in homes and catalogs. Parents and children can scan pages and see not only the boxes of 3D games but also animations like Santa Claus coming alive and telling short stories. The result was that in the 2019 Christmas catalogue, 500 games and toys came alive!
Kapten, a VTC platform, added to its application a temporary landing page named “App Christmas”. The idea was to create a very user friendly online Advent Calendar. Every day you would have the opportunity to win discounts and gifts.
These are great illustrations of how, on the one hand, digital can help to embrace the potential of a high-value marketing moment and, on the other hand, increase loyalty.
However, let’s keep in mind, as we said earlier, that many marketing moments are not really original anymore and consumers are getting used to being pampered. Indeed, we were all attacked by targeted messages about Black Friday on November or about the Back to School event in September but we were prepared and hoped that our favourite brands would make us an offer we couldn’t refuse.
Advertisers will definitely have to redouble their efforts to stand out.
In days gone by, children were talking on the phone with Santa Claus. Now they can receive a personalized video from him.
So what will the new traditions be that amaze the children of tomorrow? An interactive phone conversation with a robot Smart Santa?
We will see.
About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Business Strategy. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DBS.
