In my opinion: What I learnt about marketing at Christmas, as a marketer and a mum

In marketing, we tend to get to Christmas before it’s really begun. The lead up from September is crazy and we are celebrating the New Year by early November. We have catalogues planned, TV booked, press ads made, radio recorded and are just adding the tinsel at the end.

As we are busy planning things so well in advance, it’s easy to lose some of the excitement that the festive season should bring and just start focusing on the basic tasks ahead.

This year I really felt I got to that point and am the first to say that I let every retail marketer down in what I did just to get through the season, personally.

As a Mum of two small children, Christmas is all about the magic of Santa, his reindeer and his elves and of course, waiting to see if you are on the naughty or nice list.
As a marketer my goal is to drive traffic to my stores, to lead with the hero offers and then capture you with a compelling end or impulse buy. I want you to leave with a minimum of 3 things in your basket and a decent transaction value.

As Christmas got closer, my worst nightmare became about having to go to the shops and buy the presents and deal with the mass crowds. I didn’t provide marketers with the ability to entice me with that cherry on top – it became all about convenience and the ease of just completing what I needed to do.

I did ALL my Christmas shopping online. I did not enter a major shopping centre in the 2 months prior, nor have I even ventured near one yet, just for the thought of fighting crowds and having to deal with two grumpy kids for the hours afterwards.

This was a big change to what I had done in previous years, even though I was in the same position, but what caused this changed? I still have two small children, I still work full-time, and I still live near the shops.

The only thing that changed was that I had become more comfortable with online shopping. I had experienced it a few times through the year and the trust that I built meant that I could comfortably rely on it to make my life easier! I had realised the benefits that it provided and wanted to enjoy them when I needed it most.

I then asked myself – how many other people out there were just exactly the same as me and how much of my marketing effort actually succeeded. The numbers add up and it all looks great, so there were no campaign issues but as marketers, are we truly keeping up with the customer?

This is where I can really recognise the importance of understanding the consumer mindset and what it is that drives them to make a decision. Marketers really need to ensure that they stay well attuned to the mindset of their customers. This can be hard to do as it’s driven by personal experiences however there are general trends that would dictate the average behaviour. For example, as a mum I find going to the shops a challenge – this would be a common challenge as children have much shorter attention spans and don’t have time to browse and absorb all of the messages around them. Without stepping in to that mindset, you run the risk of not delivering the right message to the right customer at the right time.

It’s a bit like if retailers just concentrated their marketing within their stores only. If I was a part of their target audience, my Christmas experience would suggest that there Christmas and pre-Christmas campaigns would not have been as successful and they would have missed a major opportunity.

In regards to the stores that I purchased my Christmas shopping through, only one was as a result of a targeted marketing campaign. They successfully reached me using my cookies and pushed an offer to me on an independent site that had me clicking and in their store within a few steps. I didn’t make a massive purchase, however I did purchase an additional item. For the other shops – these were ones where I could trust that they would deliver and I had purchased from them previously. Funnily enough, I didn’t receive any inviting marketing in the lead up to my Christmas shopping to encourage me to shop there. This would have been ideal and possibly have captured my attention early enough where I would have increased my basket with one store over another – missed opportunity on their part and a great learning for marketers!

My Learnings

There are a few key learnings that we need to be aware of and continue to implement as a result of this:

1. Make sure that you use multi-channel marketing. Just relying on your in-store isn’t going to achieve the results you need.
2. Have your online store well aligned with your offline: customers can move between the two and you don’t want to alienate.
3. Keep learning about your customer: never assume that things don’t change.
4. Continue to keep your customers warm: you don’t know when they might next be in the right mindset to shop.

These are just a few key insights, there are probably a number of others that I could include but we all need to start somewhere. Marketing can be a tricky business and it’s important to understand that all marketing decisions need to be made with the customer at the forefront. Keeping aligned with the customer will provide you with the best opportunity of success as you continue to grow and evolve your own individual business.

In My Opinion articles are insights based on my personal experience only.

Happy New Year!

The Marketing Elf
© January 2018