Jul 29, 2010

Four Tips for a Holiday StrategyBy Michelle FarabaughMultichannelMerchant.com

If you’re like most retailers, you depend heavily on holiday to generate the bulk of your sales for the year. So it needs to be a good season.

To make the most of your holiday, it helps to map out the season’s marketing and merchandising plan well before it occurs. Here are four tips to get you started on this.

1) Don’t forget a good holiday idea
Hopefully you had a hindsight/brainstorming session with a cross-functional team as soon as holiday finished last year. That’s when the season is still fresh in everyone’s mind and ideas are flowing. “We shouldn’t have done… ” “We should have done… “

You need to have this hindsight meeting in a timely manner and document the results, findings and recommendations for next year. You don’t want to repeat the same costly mistakes or miss out on those great opportunities that were thought of during the season. Those memories and ideas become more vague with time.

Keep a holiday folder where you put the prior year’s hindsight and ideas, as well as any new ideas that pop up throughout the year. That folder will be invaluable when kicking off the brainstorming and planning for this holiday season.

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