As the dust settles on the Christmas season the estimates are that retail sales will be about 2.5% up on last year. The internet’s share of sales has increased dramatically again and overall web based sales will be up around 50% on 2005. Meanwhile research conducted for eBay by ICM reports that Britons spent around £4bn on unwanted gifts. That’s equivalent to £92 per person and represents a third of all the presents bought!

Despite this, during December it seemed to be standard practice for one or more retailers to be moaning about how terrible the Christmas shopping season was (with the notable exception of John Lewis and Marks and Spencer).

As part of a training program I ran just before Christmas we set the task of discovering insights into Christmas shopping behaviour to help retailers drive sales earlier in the Christmas shopping period (rather than have people wait for the sales). It was a fictitious case study, but one I think many retailers might identify with.

We made many discoveries in the course of this program, but I want to focus on just two underlying motivations which I think explain the apparent paradox in the statistics.

Insight 1 - Like Junkies, people still want to chase the highs of Christmas Past
As we puzzled over the fragments of evidence thrown up by some very spontaneous consumer observations and interviews, a familiar pattern of behaviour started to emerge. All of a sudden it became clear that the frantic missions of people in the run up to Christmas seemed to be akin to that of a junkie searching for a high. People were not able to explain their behaviour in rational terms – quite the contrary in fact – most were out there in the shops compulsively buying things for Christmas and at the same time moaning about how they didn’t know why they were doing it.

Perhaps it is not surprising that this is the case when you think about our life experience of Christmas. Most of us spend the first 5-10 years of our lives being programmed by our parents to become addicted to the high of Christmas. We take the Christmas pill once a year and most also suffer the comedown when the temporary nature of the buzz quickly passes.

Then our parents, determined to recreate the excitement of the past continue to use the same formula for the next 50 years, temporarily getting a hit when the second generation of families enters the fray for a few years.

Insight 2 - Today people want fewer better and simpler
This second area is even more straight-forward, it is simply about the tyranny of choice and economic success. The reality for most people in the UK is that we have more money than we need. The days of the need for a winter festival where we actually get to eat enough are long past. In fact roughly 39% of us are now overweight and 18% obese. What’s more our homes are stuffed full of things we don’t want – perhaps unsurprising when you can buy a DVD player for £19.99 and a toaster for £4.48 at Currys!

Insight in context
Insight 2 implies we should be buying less stuff for people, making charity donations, exchanging experiences rather than things. Insight 1 suggests we will continue to buy more things. Given the statistics at the start of the article it is clear that insight 1 is winning and that insight 2 only kicks in after Christmas when we get rid of the junk on eBay!

Here are four context shifts around the needs which go part of the way to explaining the outcomes:

1. We’ve gone from poor to wealthy
2. We all grow from children to adults
3. Some of our behaviours are learned as a child and some are learned as adults
4. We have a cultural frame which we could shorthand as “disposable society”

But there is a fifth context frame that I believe is also having a big impact which I will call the “Retailer Inertia” frame.

Looking around the high street before Christmas the thing that was really striking was that retailers were behaving exactly as they were 20 years ago. The same high-carbohydrate, high-fat festival foods, the same old product-oriented gifts stacked high on the shelves.

It seems the only people who are actually capitalising on insight 2 are the charities and the web-based retailers some of whom have created innovative experience based gifts and methods of making donations in lieu of presents.

All of which implies a massive opportunity to be had by high street retail to innovate in the run up to Christmas and perhaps extend their Christmas shopping season.

Final thoughts
In writing this article I can’t get out of my head one of Skinners famous experiments to explore the difference between rats and humans…..

He built a scaled up maze so he could get a trial group of students to run it. He got rats to run a standard maze for cheese and the student group to run the scaled up maze for $5 notes.
The initial results where not all that remarkable – the students did manage to work out the maze and get to the $5 notes a little quicker than the rats got to their cheese. But the big finding was when they ran the extinguishing part of the experiment. They took away the cheese and the $5 bills. After a few times the rats stopped running the maze. But the students never stopped, like ourselves at Christmas and the mangers of our retailers, they kept running the maze in the hope that the $5 notes would be there again.

© David Walker 2006. All rights reserved.

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