It may be roasting outside, but for marketers, Christmas is just around the corner. Maddie Cullen of Ready Agency provides some tips on targeting consumers during the festive period

Christmas. The busiest time of year for marketers. But it doesn’t start as the nights are drawing in; most people are already planning ahead for the festive season.

Christmas is a time for increased sales, but also for increased competition. Brands fight tooth and nail to be one of the items wrapped up in a bow, stuffed in a stocking or served up for Christmas treats.

Here are a few ways brands can make sure they’re the ones under the Christmas tree this year.

Even Rudolf has one

It should come as no surprise that mobile is the top focus for brands this year. People are increasingly having ‘micro moments’, which are the quick searches and checks on their phones, giving consumers instant information at the swipe of a finger.

It’s these minutes/seconds that brands should be slotting themselves into. If a brand can be a solution to a mobile user’s query, that can be the first step on the journey to purchase.

In the last few years 42% of people planned to do all of their Christmas shopping on mobile. Brands should make sure they’ve optimised for mobile and their site is user-friendly, otherwise a busy Christmas shopper could give up and try somewhere else.

However, it’s good news for those brands that do capture the attention of an eager shopper. Research shows that people are happiest online when shopping! So customers are going to be in a good mood and therefore likely to spend more and treat themselves or others.

But it’s not just during the lead up to Christmas that brands need to be on phones. Christmas Day is actually one of the busiest mobile shopping days of the year. People may have cash burning a hole in their pockets, or a bad present to replace, but either way, they’re actively buying on Christmas day.

Like Father Christmas, be everywhere

But not everyone is doing all of their shopping on mobile – for some people the journey goes on for much longer than that.

More and more consumers are researching reviews, images and videos before buying gifts. This can take them from a product website to their Facebook chat to a celebrities Instagram account and anywhere else they can find.

People increasingly start an order in one place and finish it at another, whether that’s changing from browser to app or from desktop to phone. Omnichannel should be the word on every brand’s lips this year.

Consumers are also splitting up their shopping techniques. Some people research online and buy in-store, and some research in-store and buy online. Brands must make sure that they can accommodate both types by making it easy to buy and providing essential information at every touchpoint. Whether this is on their website or social media or on the packaging, make sure that consumers have no excuse to put the product back on the shelf! (Digital or otherwise).

In the festive season people are out and about more. Socialising takes over sitting in front of the TV or browsing on a laptop – but they’re still on their phone. This is what connects all the research consumers are doing in-store and online.

The success of the strategy can be seen when brands that aren’t embracing an omnichannel approach like Next are failing to engage. Having a nice shop front means very little if your online presence is non-existent. Like consumers, be connected.

You don’t know The Ice Queen?

If there’s one thing we’ve learn from the last year, it’s that influencers aren’t going away anytime soon.

In the winter months they have all the same benefits as usual but amplified. Christmas is the perfect time of year for influencers because people are ready to be, well, influenced. Consumers are constantly on the lookout for inspiration for gifts, decorations, food and anything they can buy to make this Christmas ‘the best one yet’.

Influencers are also great at breaking through the noise and reaching consumers that otherwise wouldn’t be aware of what a brand is selling. This is especially important at the most competitive time of the year!

One in five YouTube views are instigated by a search. This means that those viewers have a ‘lean-in’ mindset. They’re the perfect people to reach with YT pre-roll and brand partnerships. A lot of these people are actively looking for information. A carefully selected influencer can start that journey to purchase for them.

Amazon used influencers well with their Prime campaign last year. They teamed up with a few YouTubers to show how useful the service can be in the lead up to the big day. Ingrid Nilsen assembled a box of goodies for her best friend and her dog and Alex Wassabi collected gifts for his girlfriend. Each of the influencers did something personal and real and showed their millions of followers why Amazon Prime works so well, especially when Christmas shopping.

Utilising content creators generates an added advantage for those brands that do it well at Christmas.

Let’s serve dessert before mains

This year, be different.

John Lewis have set a standard for Christmas advertising to create an emotional, entertaining story. The majority of major supermarkets follow suit. But unless the copycats have a clear enough branding, people will just associate the memory of an emotional ad with John Lewis. The brands that break the mould this year will capture much more attention. Amazon’s ad last year that focused on products actually rated higher for likability than the John Lewis monster story.

That isn’t to say don’t be emotional. Christmas celebrations are rooted in feelings. Brands that lose sight of this risk offending people – as Poundland has learnt from their Elf behaving badly campaign. You can joke about Christmas but don’t go too far as to make a mockery of it. Most people love and enjoy celebrating the holiday and don’t want that feeling dragged through the dirt.

A brand that did this well was H&M, with its ad directed by Wes Anderson. It told an emotional story, but still featured a cast of characters decked out in H&M attire. The story was fun, but the brand message was clear enough that when people thought back, there wasn’t any mistaking the brand.

But remember, what worked one year isn’t guaranteed to succeed the next. People and trends change. Christmas is close to the New Year and summing up the finished year – customers want familiarity, but they want something exciting too. (As we all know from the disappointment of opening up a pair of socks again – thanks grandma!)

Brands need to keep a strong presence online but shouldn’t lack in traditional areas either. At Christmas, every touchpoint counts. Techniques that work at other times of the year, like influencers, still work at Christmas. The difference is, everything needs to be rooted in emotion.

Even if some people eat Christmas dinner after presents, we’re all still human.

Maddie Cullen is Marketing Assistant at Ready, a multi-disciplined creative agency specialising in breakthrough promotional and tactical marketing campaigns. Clients include Soap & Glory, Kiddylicious, Burt’s Bees and Molton Brown.

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AB InBev, the world’s biggest beer company, has been supporting its new alcohol-free beer, Budweiser Prohibition, with a UK anti-drink drive digital and Out Of Home campaign, plus a sampling drive through Tesco.

A major ad campaign centres on people getting home safely for Christmas. The global beer brand is supporting the Department for Transport (DfT) for its THINK! Christmas campaign, designed to tackle drink driving.

The OOH ads and the digital push run until December 31st 2017, delivering a series of festive but pertinent messages encouraging people to make smart drinking choices during the festive period and get home safely for Christmas.

A key part of the campaign is a nationwide giveaway of Budweiser Prohibition, via a digital Budweiser Christmas card from www.budprohibition.com, to be redeemed in Tesco outlets.

Rowan Chidgey, Marketing Manager for Budweiser UK, says: “As an iconic global beer brand, we not only have a responsibility to help fight important issues like drink driving, but also to make it easier for people to make smart drinking choices. We’re really pleased to be supporting THINK! to keep safety front of mind this Christmas and proud to make great products like Budweiser Prohibition, so party-goers can enjoy beer as well as moderation. We’ve put it at the heart of our responsible drinking campaign this year, so as many people as possible can celebrate this Christmas and get home safely.”

The THINK! drink drive campaign coincides with the National Police enforcement campaign, which runs throughout December.

While road casualties caused by drink driving have fallen dramatically in recent years, the latest statistics recorded 5,730 accidents and 8,470 casualties in England and Wales in 2015 due to drink driving.

Road Safety Minister Jesse Norman said: “Thanks to generations of THINK! campaigns, drink driving has become socially unacceptable, with an 88% drop in fatalities over the last three decades. This year’s THINK! campaign builds on that record, working to prevent this devastating behaviour, which puts so many lives at risk.”

This year’s Budweiser campaign is part of AB InBev’s Global Smart Drinking Goals, which seek to reduce the harmful use of alcohol with an investment of one billion dollars across the globe in marketing campaigns to influence social norms and change behaviours – to measurably decrease harmful alcohol use over the next ten years. One of the goals is for 20% of AB InBev’s volumes to be low-to-no alcohol by 2025. Budweiser Prohibition will be a major contributor to this goal as an alcohol-free beer.

AB InBev is a founding member of the UK self-regulatory body for alcohol marketing, the Portman Group, and a major funder of the independent Drinkaware Trust.

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Free-to-register baby club Aptaclub has joined forces with charity Mummy’s Star for ‘Christmas Wishes’, a festive campaign fronted by brand ambassador Binky Felstead, star of Made In Chelsea and herself a new mum.

‘Christmas Wishes’ provides parents with the opportunity to make a wish for the future of their little ones as part of an online campaign and competition run on social media. Parents are being invited to post on Aptaclub UK’s Facebook or Instagram the wish they would like to make for their bump or baby.

Fifty winners will then be picked at random to receive a personalised wooden star made from seasoned holly to hang on their Christmas tree.

The campaign, created by Unlimited Group agencies Prophecy and Fever, is in support of charity Mummy’s Star, which is a UK and Irish charity dedicated to women and their families affected by cancer during pregnancy and shortly after a birth.

To celebrate the campaign’s launch, Binky added a unique wish for her daughter, India, on a handcrafted wooden star – which read: ‘Always know how much you are loved’ – to her glittering Christmas tree.

Lesley-Anne Cohen, Brand Manager for Aptaclub says: “We’re incredibly proud to have joined forces with charity Mummy’s Star for the Aptaclub Christmas Wishes campaign. The team there take great care to help pregnant women and new mums who are fighting cancer, and we’re delighted to be supporting and raising awareness of the inspiring work they do.”

Aptaclub is a free-to-register baby club, set-up to give expert advice and guidance for mums-to-be and mums along their 1,000-day parenting journey, helping them make the best decisions for their baby’s future health. Every year mums-to-be and mums join Aptaclub, the majority during pregnancy, in order to receive support and information on a multitude of pregnancy and post-natal related topics.

Aptaclub is a free-to-register baby club, set-up to give expert advice and guidance for mums-to-be and mums along their 1,000-day parenting journey, helping them make the best decisions for their baby’s future health. Every year mums-to-be and mums join Aptaclub, the majority during pregnancy, in order to receive support and information on a multitude of pregnancy and post-natal related topics.

Mummy’s Star is the only charity in the UK and Ireland dedicated to supporting women and their families affected by cancer during pregnancy or within the first 12 months of giving birth.

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Baileys has launched Baileys Treat Stop, a pop-up featuring the Diageo liqueur brand’s first customisable bar menu, where people can transform lattes, hot chocolates and cocktails.

Created for Baileys by experiential and event agency RPM, Baileys Treat Stop opened on December 4th 2017 in London’s Covent Garden, offering those seeking festive indulgence a wall-to-wall celebration.

Joanna Andrews, Baileys Senior Brand Manager, says, “Baileys Treat Stop is a Baileys fantasyland for fun loving grown-ups looking to treat up their pre-Christmas shopping trip, for imaginative Baileys fans who fancy flexing their creative cocktail creation skills or for friends just looking for the ultimate festive, indulgent retreat.”

Dom Robertson, Managing Director at RPM, adds: ‘We’re really excited and proud to take Baileys Treat Stop to Covent Garden where their indulgent treats can be shared on this festival occasion’

Open until December 17th, Baileys Treat Stop includes a luxurious Alpine themed snug area for visitors to chill-out, a bar serving Baileys Original Irish Cream, Baileys Pumpkin Spice and Baileys Chocolate Luxe hot drinks, expert workshops and an exclusive Baileys cocktail-style desert designed by well-known food and drink creators.

Baileys has teamed up with The Treat Collective, a group of creators in the food and drink world, to design an exclusive, playful and over-the-top Baileys treat for fans to indulge themselves after a day’s Christmas shopping.

The Baileys Treat Stop is open from December 4th to December 17th (closed December 11th) for drop ins and ticketed workshops. Workshops will be held on December 5^th, 6^th, 12^th and 13^th with two 1.5 hour sessions per evening.

Baileys Original Irish Cream, Baileys Pumpkin Spice and Baileys Chocolat Luxe are on sale at the Baileys Treat Stop (retailed at £15); fans who post to social media with the hashtag #treatup will receive an exclusive chocolate reindeer gift with their purchase.

The chocolate reindeer gift with purchase will also be available nationwide through drinks delivery service 31Dover (www.31dover.com) from November 27th.

Baileys is owned by Diageo, a global leader in beverage alcohol, which also owns Johnnie Walker, Crown Royal, JεB, Buchanan’s, Windsor, Smirnoff, Cîroc and Ketel One vodkas, Captain Morgan, Baileys, Don Julio, Tanqueray and Guinness amongst others.

RPM is an independent award-winning event and experiential agency which celebrates its 25^th anniversary in 2018. Working from its HQ in London’s Shepherds Bush, RPM delivers multi-channel global campaigns for clients including Diageo, M&S, Mondelez and Heineken.

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Hovis, the iconic British bread brand, is running a Christmas on-pack promotion on its Best of Both loaves offering consumers the chance to win a Grand Prize of a family holiday to Lapland plus winter experiences or one of 1,000 Hovis Christmas egg cup and toast cutter sets.

Most ‘family holiday’ prizes are for two adults and two children aged 12 and under; however, for this promotion, Hovis has taken the unusual step of specifying in the terms and conditions that only the entrant needs to be over 18; if they win, then the second traveller can be of any age and the third and fourth travellers must be 17 or under. This allows for a much wider range of family groups to enjoy the prize. Anyone under 16 will have to have written parental consent to be allowed to travel.

Just under six and a half million promotional packs featuring a temporary Christmas pack design went live in store mid-November. To enter, UK mainland consumers have to buy a promotional pack, visit the www.hovischristmas.com website and enter their details and the 10 digit code found on the best before tag. They will then be entered into a draw to win either the Grand Prize or the branded egg cups and toast cutters.

There is a No Purchase Necessary entry route for consumers who live in Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland.

The Grand Prize is a five-night trip to Lapland, Finland, for up to four people, plus flights, travel insurance, £1,000 spending money and up to three activities, such as a husky safari, a Northern Lights viewing tour and a reindeer farm visit by snowmobile, including a reindeer sled ride and Lappish dinner. Activities are dependent on time of year and weather conditions.

The Grand Prize cannot be taken during Christmas and New Year (23rd December 2018 – 2nd January 2019), Easter Sunday (1st April 2018) and Bank Holiday periods in the UK (30th March, 2nd April, 7th May, 28th May and 27th August 2018); aside from these dates, however, it appears there are no exclusion for school holidays.

Hovis has a long history of promotional campaigns – in fact, the product’s name was the result of a competition run in 1887; a London student won £25 for his suggestion, which is a contraction of the Latin phrase hominis vis – “the strength of man”. The Hovis brand is now owned 51% by global private equity company, The Gores Group, and 49% by Premier Foods.

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Coca-Cola UK has announced that its Coca-Cola Christmas truck tour will kick off for 2017 in Glasgow on November 11th and will visit 42 stops nationwide during the festive season, before making its final appearance at Lakeside, Essex, on December 17th.

This year, visitors will be able to snap and project their festive selfies across the side of the truck while enjoying a 150ml can of Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, Diet Coke or Coca-Cola Classic in a winter wonderland setting.

For those visiting as the sun sets, the truck comes to life with a special animation celebrating the magic Coca-Cola brings to Christmas. Every truck stop will also include a recycling call-to-action, encouraging consumers to recycle bottles and cans in line with Coca-Cola’s recent ‘Love Story’ recycling advert.

Over the last seven years, the truck tour has attracted thousands of consumers generating over 50,000 festive photos. It has travelled over 730,000 miles – the equivalent of 29 times around the world – twinkling its 8,772 fairy lights and playing the iconic ‘Holidays are Coming’ jingle.

Coca-Cola’s ‘Holidays Are Coming’ advert will return to UK screens, 22 years since first being aired. The first air takes place on November 17^th with a special Christmas twist on Channel 4.

Aedamar Howlett, marketing director for Coca-Cola Great Britain, says: “Coca-Cola is synonymous with the Christmas season and it’s no secret that our much-loved Christmas Truck Tour marks the unofficial countdown to Christmas. We can’t wait to start spreading holiday cheer and we are excited to announce a brand new route for 2017 – which brings a sprinkling of festive magic to fans across the UK.”

Full details of the Coca-Cola Christmas truck tour are available at www.cocacola.co.uk/coca-cola/trucktour-2017/. Consumers are being encouraged to get involved on Twitter using the #HolidaysAreComing emoji throughout December or by sharing a picture on Snapchat or Instagram, using the Coca-Cola festive filters.

Coca-Cola will also be collaborating with Capital FM for its 9^th annual Jingle Bell Ball, where an estimated 32,000 attendees will receive a sample of Coca-Cola Zero Sugar.

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Quirky personalised gift company Harrow & Green, which usually sells its products via its own website or ecommerce sites such as Notonthehighstreet.com, is again opening a present personalisation pop-up in iconic department store Selfridges on London’s Oxford Street.

Shoppers searching for the perfect bespoke Christmas present for their loved ones will be able to enlist the help of a crew of elves provided by staffing specialists Blackjack Promotions.

Harrow & Green mainly sells through websites, offering a range of customisable personalised products which includes special Christmas stockings and sacks. However, last year, in the run-up to the festive period, it set up a special pop-up personalised gift boutique in Selfridges’ Christmas Shop, with Blackjack’s help.

That experiment proved so popular that Harrow & Green is doing it again this year, with its pop-up set open from early September. Blackjack has recruited and trained a team of four staff, who will be on hand to guide shoppers through the mysteries of Christmas wrapping and help them select personalised gifts for friends and family.

The brand ambassadors, wearing Harrow & Green-branded aprons, will also make the bespoke items, which can carry shopper-selected messaging, including children’s names and dates of birth.

Philip Taylor, who co-founded Harrow & Green with his wife Tanya, says: “Our Christmas pop-up in Selfridges offers the perfect opportunity for us to share our passion for all things beautiful. We’re inspired by modern typography, old-style fonts, and the way text can be combined with original design to produce high quality, great-looking personalised Christmas gifts, stockings and sacks. We need intelligent, engaging staff who share our passion for the beautiful and who can articulate our vision and our brand values – and Blackjack has already shown it’s more than capable of recruiting and training just the right people.”

Fiona Tindall, Head of Domestic Retail at Blackjack Promotions, says: “Blackjack needs fully-trained brand ambassadors who understand the brand inside out, can operate the printing process and embody the Harrow & Green charm. Fundamentally, it’s moving the relationship from being a purely transactional, product-based one to being an emotional, experiential one.”

The Harrow & Green Christmas pop-up will be open in Selfridges until December 24th, 2017.

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Zeek, a website and app that lets consumers buy and sell unwanted gift cards, is launching a one-day pop-up shop offering consumers the chance to swap their unwanted Christmas gift cards for the equivalent amount in cash – or donate the equivalent amount to charity.

The ‘Cash or Kind’ pop-up will be open on Tuesday 10th January at the Westfield Stratford shopping centre. Shoppers will be offered the chance to exchange unwanted vouchers for cash to buy something they really want or to donate their gift cards or vouchers to charity.

Zeek has pledged to match any charity donations.

The pop-up will accept most gift cards, paper and digital vouchers, so long as they have a minimum value of £5 and up to a maximum of £100.

The pop-up will be open from 9.00am-4.00pm and has been launched on the back of research from Zeek that shows that the average British consumer receives £44 worth of unwanted gifts over Christmas, with around £300m potentially wasted nationwide.

The pop-up shop was conceived by Zeek’s PR agency, Tin Man Communications.

The Zeek app and site provide a marketplace for selling and buying gift vouchers, allowing consumers to exchange unwanted cards for cash and also to buy gift cards at discounted rates (on average, 10% off). The app is available on App Store and Google Play.

To list a card or voucher, users just scan them using their smart phone camera and post them to the platform. Zeek claims 94% of vouchers sell within 24 hours – Amazon vouchers have sold within five seconds.

Zeek was set up by co-founders Itay Erel, Daniel Zelkind and Ziv Isaiah in Israel. Since receiving initial funding from Uri Levine, one of the co-founders of map software company Waze (bought by Google for over $1bn), Blumberg Capital and QUALCOMM Ventures, it has successfully launched in the UK and now has over 100,000 users trading on the platform. Zeek has offices in Israel and London.

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Burger King is running a promotional campaign this Christmas where it will swap an unwanted present for a burger.

On Boxing Day (December 26th 2016), selected Burger King outlets will let customers bring in gifts of any value to exchange for one free burger. All presents received will be donated to a local charity.

The catch? The outlets participating in the promotion are one restaurant in Miami, Florida, one in London, UK, and an unspecified number in Brazil.

In London, the outlet involved is the Burger King restaurant in Leicester Square. Unwanted gifts must be unused and, a Burger King spokesperson says, accepted only at the discretion of employees at participating outlets. The first 500 qualifying gifts brought in to the Leicester Square outlet between 10.00am and 6.00pm on Boxing Day will be swapped for a flame-grilled Whopper sandwich.

People unable to make it to a participating restaurant with their unwanted gifts on December 26th can still participate in the promotion by posting a picture on social media of their questionable presents with the hashtag #WhopperExchange. A certain number will be rewarded with a gift card which they can redeem for a free Whopper at their local restaurant.

Renato Rossi, Chief Marketing Officer for Burger King UK, says: “At BURGER KING restaurants, we are always looking for ways to surprise our fans, no matter if they were good or naughty. The Whopper Exchange will offer our guests the chance to basically get a flame-grilled gift in exchange for an unwanted one. Because this holiday season, we want everyone to receive something they will love.”

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Andy DeVito of Blackjack Promotions has some timely advice on Christmas-related marketing

The Christmas period is all about tradition. The supermarket aisles filled with gifts and decorations, the Christmas TV ad battle and the traditional headlines about this year’s ‘Winter Blunderland’ Christmas-themed event.

Muddy fields rather than pristine snow; elves who are drunk, abusive or smoking; a ‘Polar Express’ which costs more, mile for mile, than the Orient Express; and a Santa experience which is more grotty than Grotto.

Year in, year out, the media reports on the heartbreak of those punters who have forked out £150 for a family ticket to feed carrots to a sad donkey wearing fake antlers before their 30 seconds with a Bad Santa. It seems like no matter how many disastrous Christmas theme parks are exposed every year, some people never learn.

I’m not just talking about consumers here: there are lessons that all of us who work in the experiential industry could do with taking to heart.

Here are just a few of them…

Location, Location, Location

There are very good reasons why the best Christmas experiential activations tend to take place in big department stores, shopping malls and transit hubs, not muddy fields outside Milton Keynes.

For one thing, it makes commercial sense, particularly for big brands. If you set up your extravaganza in a location which is going to see major footfall, particularly consumers in a shopping frame of mind, then it will directly impact sales.

It’s not just about how people get there or what state of mind they’ll be in when they arrive; it’s also about having enough space and resources on hand to deliver a great activation. Take shopping malls – they are already effectively retail theatres, with the infrastructure to allow you to deploy giant sleighs and chorus lines of dancing teddy bears.

Train stations and airports are other excellent places to run Christmas-themed events. Again, they have great facilities, good theatre-like spaces, doors and lifts which can handle large items of equipment, and lots of people who are going to spend the time waiting for their train or flight browsing the retail outlets.

Santa’s Little Helpers

Elves are supposed to be magical creatures who sing and dance as they make toys for good children. They’re not supposed to reek of cigarettes and booze, and they’re expected to be happy and cheerful no matter what the situation – not surly and abusive. The same applies to Santa himself, only more so.

If you think about it, though, professional, well-trained brand ambassadors are a key ingredient in the success of any activation, whether it’s a Christmas special, a Halloween Fright Night, an Easter Egg Hunt or sampling in a supermarket carpark.

The clue is in the job title: Brand Ambassadors. They represent the brand, which means they have to exemplify its values. Make sure the staff you deploy have been fully trained in all aspects of the brand and the product they will be promoting.

Check any requirements for staff with special skills – tech people, gymnasts and the like. And if there is going to be any contact with children, then make sure your ambassadors are CRB checked.

The true meaning of Christmas

One final point. Christmas is now a massive commercial opportunity and the biggest sales period of the year. But there are still plenty of people for whom Christmas has obvious religious overtones. That includes Christians but also people of other faiths.

Do not offend people by misusing religious symbols, by appearing to hijack the story of the Nativity to drive profit or by assuming that everyone you have contact with will be familiar with the story of Jesus’s birth.

You can still tap-in to the general feelings of goodwill that Christmas evokes in most people – just look at the current crop of Christmas ads. But whatever you do needs to be on-brand and genuine, not tawdry tat.

Andy DeVito is Account Director – Experiential at Blackjack Promotions, which provides leading staffing solutions, travel retail and specialist experiential services in the UK and the Middle East. Its core service offering falls under three headings: travel retail, experiential and logistics. It also works hand-in-hand with agency partners and media owners using its experiential expertise to bring brands and briefs to life. Blackjack is a member of the Airport Promotion Agencies (APA), of which Blackjack MD Sally Alington is joint-chairman, and the Institute of Promotional Marketing (IPM).

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