The most promotion-heavy and consumerism-crazed of all seasons, Holiday Season, sees retailers airing Christmas ads, promoting sales the moment trick-or-treat is done, prompting the consumers to embrace early holiday shopping. “While Black Friday may have been seen as the official start to the Holiday Season in the past decade, it’s now been relegated to more of a fun social occasion as retailers push earlier sales to win over customers,” informs Allison Paul, Head of US retail and distribution, Deloitte, a consulting firm. This year, many retailers bring out Black Friday deals weeks before the actual event. According to NRF, this season retailers will try to differentiate themselves by touting price, value and exclusivity to cover up the losses that they have suffered at the beginning of the year.
This holiday season, retailers push boundaries as they bring the Christmas spirit to extraordinary new levels by launching Black Friday sales a day after Halloween, kick-starting the much awaited Holiday season from 1st November onwards.
Visible through this period, retailers such as Walmart, Kmart, Amazon, etc. are offering various deals to lure consumers. For the first time, Walmart stores are offering free shipping on items considered amongst the top 100 gifts in order to fight rival Target Corporation’s free shipping on all items promotion deal, which will last till 20th December. In addition, Walmart has launched more than 20,000 reduced priced items or ‘rollbacks’ this season and walmart.com hosted a ‘cyber savings event’ with discounts. During this season, not only is Black Friday being imitated and multiplied but stores have also replicated the model with Cyber Monday as well. Online retailer Amazon called ‘November 1’ the official start of the holiday shopping season with deals on toys, electronics and other gift items. “While Amazon has typically started holiday deals at the beginning of November, this year will feature more products and more frequent deals. Amazon will increase its deal of the day feature to include two daily deals from November 1 until December 22,” tells Julie Law, spokesperson, Amazon.
This is the first year when Sears (SHLD) offered Black Friday deals two weeks early during a friends and family sale on November 9.
Office Depot (ODP) and Office Max also started holiday deals and the stores also had Cyber Monday deals every Monday in November.
Shop.org released its 2014 online holiday sales forecast, expecting sales in November and December to grow between 8-11 per cent over last Holiday Season to as much as US $ 105 billion.
Importantly, retailers are engaging in sales battle in order to beat competition and win consumers as early as possible. Even National Retail Federation predicts that holiday sales will go up by 4.1 per cent to US $ 616.9 billion in comparison to 3.1 per cent rise during the same period in 2013. The rise would be possible through improvements in the economic indicators such as income, wage, job growth, housing prices, etc. which will give rise to increased spending power among holiday shoppers. “In the grand scheme of things, consumers are in a much better place than they were this time last year, and the extra spending power could very well translate into solid holiday sales growth for retailers; however, shoppers will still be deliberate with their purchases, while hunting for hard-to-pass-up bargains,” reveals Jack Kleinhenz, Chief Economist, NRF.
Apart from in-store sales, online will also play an important part during this season as Deloitte forecasts that digital interactions will influence 50 per cent or US $ 345 billion of retail stores sales this Holiday Season. Tech-savvy consumers who use desktop, tablets, laptop and smatphones to compare sales online and in brick-and-mortar stores influence this figure. “While online sales continue to climb, digital customer interactions through both virtual and physical store channels present greater sales opportunities than online or mobile commerce alone,” asserts Alison Paul, Vice Chairman, Deloitte LLP and retail and distribution sector leader.
Over the last 10 years, holiday sales on average have grown 2.9 per cent but according to industry predictions, this Holiday Season will be the first time since 2011 wherein holiday sales would increase more than 4 per cent. In a nutshell, retailers are not giving customers much opportunity to breathe between Halloween and Christmas promotions in order to tap into each and every holiday sale before the cold weather sets in. They know if they take a break then they run the risk of losing out to competitors who are on their toes to bring out sales and promotions to catch every dollar spent. Although holiday sales predictions are optimistic in 2014, but it remains to be seen how the consumers react to the various marketing strategies deployed to lure them to shop earlier.
