Welcome To The Home Stretch
November 2012 Integrated Solutions For Retailers
By Matt Pillar, editor in chief
The sprint to the end of the 2012 shopping season is more like a middle-distance race this year. You’ve got 32 days from Black Friday until Christmas Eve, the longest stretch of holiday shopping the calendar will allow. Now — assuming consumers don’t suffer holiday shopping fatigue — is your time to capitalize.
Holiday shopping fatigue is not such a remote possibility, though. Walmart replaced bags of charcoal in its lawn and garden center with Christmas lawn ornaments back in September, right around the time it kicked off its holiday layaway program — a month earlier than it did last year. While many people express disdain over so-called “Christmas creep,” or the annual race to get holiday merchandise out first, the NRF reports that 40% of consumers start their holiday shopping before Halloween. That’s a fact, and if you’re not taking advantage like Walmart is, you’re getting beat early at a game that yields anywhere from 20% to 40% of your annual sales.
Regardless of consumer opinion on Christmas creep, a beautiful thing about an extended holiday shopping season is the ability it affords you to be agile with your merchandising strategy. With real-time access to sales and inventory data, the static store set is a thing of the past. If an anticipated hot seller turns out to be a dud, you know it before it’s too late. You have time to promote it, and then execute a markdown if necessary, before the December 26 clearance sales temporarily recreate shoppers’ unrealistic expectations of bargain basement pricing.
On the other hand, real-time sales data gives you an opportunity to promote hot sellers in creative and differentiating ways. Consider the “social proof” phenomenon, whereby providing an item- or shelf-level suggestion that a specific product is “the number one seller in its category” or “the most popular gift item for teenage girls this season” is proven to improve sales. Consumers have a lot of decisions to make this time of year, and if you can leverage the wisdom of the crowd through real-time sales analytics, you’ll make some of those decisions easy for them, and they’ll demonstrate their appreciation at the register.
Changing up store sets during the long holiday sales season is a good idea, but real-time analytics should always be used to inform and direct that change. Too many retailers, especially small ones, change for the sake of the change. It’s far more strategic to change for the sake of sales, which you can’t possibly do if you’re unable or unwilling to pay attention to those sales. In modern retailing, success is often predicated on agility, and agility is hard to exercise with your head stuck in the sand.
One final note of encouragement before the games begin: This year, December 22 and 23 fall on a weekend. According to Shoppertrak, the second- and third-busiest shopping days of the year (behind Black Friday) are the Saturday before Christmas and December 23. Given that those two days fall in succession this year, don’t despair if your real-time numbers on December 21 aren’t where they were on that day last year. The weekend before Christmas 2012 will be a wild one.