Christmas Branding Techniques Across Industries

Christmas Branding Techniques Across Industries

With Christmas just around the corner, brands across the country are in full swing with their festive campaigns. While marketing campaigns at this time of year are always inextricably entwined with the festive period, individual brands still have different ways of offering Christmas branding.

Here are some of the most interesting ways certain industries brand themselves around Christmas time.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Supermarkets

Known as their golden quarter, Christmas is an important time for supermarkets; consumers spent more than £10.5 billion on groceries last year, which was an increase of 3.7% compared to 2016 figures.

How supermarkets do this is two-fold. Firstly, in-store promotions are tied to Christmas offerings such as the Christmas-eve basket for children and promotional stands, while typical bakery items like cookies, doughnuts, and flapjacks are replaced with mince pies.

Secondly, supermarkets go to great lengths to create a festive atmosphere in their stores by playing Christmas music and decorating with lots of tinsel and baubles. Often the decorations they choose are reminiscent of their brand colours. For instance, Asda use a lot of green, while Tesco use red and blue.

Many retailers are now also adding in countdowns to Christmas. This year, Asda have a tree at the entrance to their stores, with the number of days until Christmas lit up. This creates a sense of urgency and encourages customers to spend more to prepare for the festive period.

In television advertising, supermarkets generally stick to one style of advert: the family round the table enjoying food together. This creates the sense that large parties will make people happy, thus enticing people to spend big on family gatherings.


Coffee Shops

Coffee shops have a tradition of using their cups for promoting Yuletide sentiment across the country. Starbucks and Costa often serve their drinks in seasonal cups that contain images of stars, Christmas trees and other festive images.

Many of these stores also offer specific menus just for the Christmas period. For instance, in 2009 Costa offered a crème brûlée latte, chocolate yule log, gingerbread and mince tarts just during the run-up to the big day.

This year, Starbucks have centred their festive advertising around their Peppermint Mocha, while ensuring their logo is centred on a cup that is red, the colour of the season.

These special festive offerings become part of the brand’s identity, and some customers go to the cafes just to choose the festive option. In addition, they offer scarcity to the products, which entices audiences to visit them more often to ensure they get enough of the offerings before the season ends and they’re gone.

Beverage Industry

Those selling fizzy drinks have a strong link to Christmas, especially the Coca-Cola company. After all, Coca-Cola are mistakenly credited with the colour of Santa’s suit. While they standardised the look across the world, they admit basing their Santa look on Thomas Nast’s work for Harper’s Weekly.

Coca-Cola, however, have created a strong theme of Christmas adverts for nearly 100 years, linking their brand with Santa. This entwines Christmas and Coca-Cola together, implying that you can’t have one without the other.

Garden Centres

Garden centres are often places, where you can really get a Christmas feeling. At this time of the year, garden centres switch their focus from selling plants, to showcasing winter wonderlands and Christmas decorations, transforming entire floor plans to prioritise their festive products.

Garden centres excel in displaying their products in use; for example, toys can be out on display with staff demonstrating how they work. It also gives children a chance to try them out, which increases the demand for the toys. At the same time, garden centres will often have Father Christmas visiting, allowing children to tell him what they want for Christmas.

Garden centres with cafes will also offer special festive menus.

Technology Companies

Technology companies often focus on keeping people together during the holiday season, even if they can’t be in the same place. Therefore, they often have people talking happily over the phone or by internet conference call for their advertising.

For example, Apple use the slogan Move Someone this Holiday, encouraging people to reach out to friends and family to ensure they’re emotionally connecting with them.

Other technology brands will demonstrate how simply contacting people with their products will make others happy, thereby demonstrating that their product embodies the spirit of family togetherness at Christmas and the spirit of goodwill.

Using Christmas Promotional Staffing

What a lot of brands have in common during the Christmas period is that they use festive promotional staffing to help with branding and to sell more products. These special staff can help drive customers to specific products and promotional areas.

Some companies will have staff dress up for the festive periods. But these are sometimes lacklustre attempts that are nothing more than cosmetic changes which do little to add to the festive branding. An example would be asking staff to wear a Santa hat.

A half-hearted attempt can be rather disappointing for the brand and customers. One reason why this happens is that these staff have other duties and responsibilities, making them less motivated to participate in seasonal promotions.

Promotional staffing agencies, on the other hand, will supply staff who are motivated and focused to push your Christmas branding and festive campaigns.

In addition, Christmas promotional staff can enhance the customer experience. It all starts with their first impressions as they enter your store or turn up at an event. If the customer gets a warm reception and can be directed to the relevant place, they’ll feel happier, and this will increase transaction values.

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If you’re looking to get the Christmas spirit into your business with some promotional staff, then contact us. Get in touch with our team now to learn more about how we can help you.