Juan Pellerano-Rendon, chief marketing officer of Swap, isn’t afraid of Christmas Creep. That’s when consumers start shopping for the holidays earlier and earlier. “When we look at this year, what you’re seeing is the Targets, Amazons, Walmarts, and Best Buys of the world are adding ‘me’ shopping events, earlier in the year, like October,” Pellerano-Rendon said. “It’s the first time we’ve seen this be universal across a lot of these major retailers. If you buy a gift for yourself, you get a gift to give to someone else. They’re really incentivizing not just additional purchases, but self-gifting, which will be a big trend this holiday season. That’s for a number of reasons.”
One is Black Friday and Cyber Monday, two monumental events, but you don’t want your brand’s entire retail year to be reliant on two days. Retailers are trying to convince shoppers instead of waiting for the last minute for those two days or waiting for a few days before Christmas, to start buying much earlier so they can smooth out the curves in their supply chains.
“Then they can look into those two days and have more predictability of what it’s going to look like,” Pellerano-Rendon said. “It gets ahead of the return cycle too. Where brands are not waiting until January if there’s going to be a slew of returned items, they have a better sense of that in November and December before the holidays and maybe they’ll be able to resell them before the holiday’s over.”
Online shoppers spent $38 billion during last year’s Cyber Week period. A record $12 billion was spent on Cyber Monday alone, a 10% increase over the previous year. Those numbers are only likely to increase this year, Pellerano-Rendon said.
“The other thing that’s going into it too, is there’s a lot of uncertainty in an election year,” he said. “There’s been really strong consumer data, particularly in this last third quarter. It was the strongest in the last year. So everything has, from a daata standpoint, supported continued growth. There are varying degrees of what that growth will look like in Q4. On the more conservative side you have Deloitte and the National Retail Federation predicting 2 % to 3 % growth, and someone like Emarketers expecting 4 percent growth, and maybe double digit growth for ecommerce.”
There’s obviously sensitivity around doing too much sales early because you’re eating into your margins. “Doing more of that is probably not beneficial to the business in the long run,” Pellerano-Rendon said. “You can get ahead of some gifting and incentivise some of those top priority customers who are spending with you in significant numbers. It’s important to use CRM messaging and use social advertising and make it clear that the season has changed and that you should get ahead of your holiday shopping.”
“Consumers will feel that they don’t need to wait, that they’ll have the same deal in October as they’d have in December,” Pellerano-Rendon said. “Retailers are giving consumers the understanding that there are multiple entry points to be able to take advantage of the same discounts. There’s going to be a lot more price comparison than you would have seen in years prior. The deals you’re seeing are consistent with what would be offered on Black Friday or Cyber Monday.”
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