There are 41 days to Christmas, but the lead in to the year’s busiest retail period began almost two weeks ago. The festive season and its marketing merriment gets longer every year; it used to be that Halloween marked the turning point, when the colours bewitching our senses segued from orange and black to red and green, like a commercial changing of the leaves.
But now it seems supermarkets and department stores start stocking shelves with Christmas goods as early as the back-to-school push.
Noël 2014 comes off the back of a favourable budget and whispers of wondrous economic growth. Come, they tell us, the good days are back, and spending-power is back with a pa rum pum pum pum.
As Advent edges ever closer, the figures do at least look positive for retailers. A recent Barclays Bank Ireland study says that we are all set to spend more than last year, with our eyes scanning shelves for the more expensive items. And there's even better news for retailers - almost 60 percent of us will return to the very same shops to do it all again next year.
Christmas lights and megabytes
Today, all around the country, cities and towns are turning on their Christmas lights on an effort to draw out the crowds of Christmas shoppers. Whether or not families will brave the elements of an ‘Orange Alert’ rainstorm to marvel at the golden hue of twinkly fairylights remains to be seen, but the Christmas season is a marathon, not a sprint.
The pacesetters are the online retailers, first to pitch and banking that surfing for seasonal gifts at competitive prices will capture consumers who’d rather put the kettle on than a raincoat. It’s ‘Dot Com, All Ye Faithful’, with marketing campaigns emailing an avalanche of promotional material directly into your hand.
The exact wording of every message is pored over with precision colder than a polar vortex, with calls-to-action setting out that every online brand is the go-to destination for a hassle-free holiday shopping.
And colour is everything.
If you thought that the shades of red so commonplace at Christmas were all thanks to Santa Claus’ clothes, there’s actually a bit more psychology to it. The colours we see all play into subconscious beliefs, with swathes of scarlet stimulating and inspiring the spender in you to take action. Greens go with wealth, reassuring you there’s value to be had in splashing the cash, while classic black speaks of luxury. The colours in all those emails say a thousand words.
Then there are the Christmas adverts; John Lewis is the master, turning Monty the penguin an international news story, and cleverly getting you to share the campaign for them - indelibly linking a shop that doesn’t even trade in Ireland with the festive season and turning subsequent campaigns into an annual event.
What's in store?
But that’s all a part of the drive to get you into the shop, the holy grail of holiday shopping. By luring you across the threshold, the high-street retailer can lull your senses and sensibilities with a number of tricks. Tactile is the name of the game, positioning everything at arms reach with the understanding that for every second you hold on to an item, the likelihood of you making a purchase goes up. There’s also a school of thought on where items are positioned on shelves, with eye-level on the right-hand side seen as the ideal place to covert a browser into a buyer.
The tedious trawl through one high-street shop indistinguishable from another isn’t reflective of a lack of imagination in chain stores, rather their unwavering fidelity to brand identity; everything you sense is considered, with scents chemically formulated to awaken your emotions pumped into stores. If you are sick of hearing George Michael’s Last Christmas, blame the psychologists - they’ve proven that slow-tempo pop music encourages you to impulse buy the sundry items located at roadblocks positioned deliberately to snare shoppers. Last Christmas you gave them your heart, and also your arm and a leg.
But spare a thought for independent retailers, whose businesses depend on the Christmas rush. They’ll do four-months trade in the weeks leading up to the day, praying that a white Christmas only comes and hangs around on December 25th - bad weather is bad for business.
And when those shopkeepers on Grafton or Patrick Street look out and see thousands of bulbs light up this evening, they’ll hope those lights can guide the costumers they’re relying on through the door.
(Video produced by Luke Benson)
