Creative Christmas Gifts & Gift Ideas

Maybe Santa's getting older or maybe he's just plain lazy. 

But for whatever reason, old St. Nick decided to do much more of his holiday shopping online than on Main Street this year.  The results have delighted online giants like Amazon and dismayed traditional retailers everywhere.

In the midst of a global recession and skyrocketing unemployment, people were supposed to have no impulse to buy Christmas gifts for their friends and family this year.  And while this logic held for traditional retailers, it certainly did not dissuade people from shopping online.

Amazon Soars as Online Sales Grow

Between November 1st and December 24th, online sales topped $27 billion according to comScore, an online market research firm.  This sales total represents a 5% increase from the 2008 holiday season during the same time period.

The Wall Street Journal's Marketwatch predicts that Amazon, the online leader in consumer goods, had a record-breaking holiday season.  Experts believe the company to announce revenue in the area of $9 billion, up from $6.7 billion last year.  The company was bolstered by the success of its electronic reading tablet, the Kindle, which became the best-selling gift in Amazon's history over this holiday season.

Chain Stores Suffer, Get Desperate

Meanwhile, over on Main Street, traditional retailers did not fare nearly as well.  According to the New York Times, sales fell 2.2 percent industrywide, a drop felt mostly by big chain stores.  For instance:

• Abercrombie & Fitch was one of the biggest losers of the holiday season, with sales dropping an estimated 15% – 17%.  The company operates over 1,000 stores in the USA, but will apparently have to close as many as 300 in order to stay in business.
• After same store sales fell 12% in November and 10% in December, Hot Topic will likely have to close 200 of its nearly 700 stores in the coming year. 
• In a development that surprised no one at all, Barnes & Noble stores struggled mightily this season.  With sales off by 5%, it's clear that the culprit is Amazon, which continues to lure consumers away from malls.

Still, other companies clung to life with incremental gains in the retail sector.  Many big box stores, including Wal-Mart, Target and Toys-R-Us resorted to offering major discounts in order to pull in customers.  Sears Holdings Company (which includes K-Mart), for instance, posted a 0.4% growth during December in same-store sales due in large part to offering big discounts.

The Lesson: Only the Social Survive

Some retailers heard the bell toll for Main Street years ago.  Those who enlisted the support of advanced online marketing strategies had drastically better results this year.  Clients of the Art Technology Group (ATG), an e-commerce marketing company, saw strong holiday seasons.  For example, Calender Holdings LLC, reported "double-digit revenue growth versus the previous year."

Minyanville, an online business journal, offered some examples of companies that successfully bucked the trend this year, but didn't give a whole lot of evidence as to why they were successful.  I decided to take a look for myself.

JC Penney Innovates Faster than the Competition

When other retail stores were worrying about the revenue that online sales might siphon away from stores, JC Penney jumped headlong into online marketing earlier than virtually any other major brand.  The company, which now operates the fourth largest online retail store in the world, now maintains a commitment to innovative online marketing, optimizing its strategies regularly to keep pace with the speed of change on the web.  For instance, the company now offers deals and coupons through its Facebook page (over 700,000 fans) and its relatively new (less than 4000 followers) Twitter page.  Also, JC Penney recently scrapped its twice yearly Big Book catalogs in favor of online recommendations and smaller catalogs designed to appeal to different types of customers.  This is great news for people who hate junk mail, but terrible news for bored retirees.

Urban Outfitters Made its Website Social

With its “Show Us How You Wore It” campaigns and its focus on social networking, Urban Outfitters has developed a highly interactive and a highly effective relationship with and between its customers.  Instead of simply hawking products on its website, Urban chose to create a social network.  The site highlights the best reviewers – not the best reviews.  In this way, customers are led to see the personalities that attach to the clothes they buy.  In another smart move, the company sent its products to fashion bloggers and asked them to “Show Us How You Wore It” – or send photos of themselves back to the company, which the company would post on the website.  This would inevitably cause the bloggers to link to Urban’s site, further bolstering the company’s image. 

J. Crew Writes Better Email Blasts and Maintains Better Customer Relations

J. Crew might enter the U.K. market next year without selling an item at a retail store.  The company, which redefined its image in 1996 when it launched its website and began shifting to a more web-based approach, would only have to sell and promote its products online.  Nowadays, J. Crew’s email blasts are lauded industrywide for their simplicity, aesthetics, and for being idiot-proof.  In addition, the company entices people to join its Facebook fan site with free shipping for fans.

It's interesting to note that just having a Facebook page isn't enough anymore.  Truly successful online retailers are using the internet in many innovative ways, looking to find new opportunities on various platforms and rethinking how they promote themselves on the established ones (more on this in future posts).

In any case, for retailers across the country and the globe, the message is clear: get a better online marketing strategy or go the way of the dinosaur.  Santa's too old and too overweight to make his way to Main Street.

That's Great, but How Did www.christmasgifts.im Do?

Sales increased by infinity here at Creative Christmas Christmas Gifts & Gift Ideas in 2009, but I still didn't make enough to buy an iPhone.  However, if revenue continues to rise by infinity, I will be blogging from the moon next year. 

On a more serious note, I found a very interesting piece of information about my kind of blogging in a Business Wire article on holiday season marketing techniques:

Industry-wide, the 2009 holiday period saw a threefold increase over 2008 in the total number of product recommendations served daily by merchants, an indication of how many more online retailers are using recommendations and automated merchandising to quickly and easily optimize their online storefronts.

Looks like companies realize that they have to start serving consumers the information they require to make informed decisions.  It will be interesting to see if this trend continues over the next year (and how they cope with little guys like me competing for their readers!).