High-Street Blues Spur Marketers Into Tweaking Christmas Strategies

This being a crucial time of the year for us marketing folk, I could not help but click yesterday on a news link that had “Christmas” and “media agencies” in its title. This is how I found out that over 60% of the marketers and agencies participating in an O2 Media study have made adjustments to their Christmas strategies due to mounting concerns that the 2011 festive season will be a shabby one.

Within a group of 20 participants, 40% confessed to being jittery on account of the current economic environment. Amid growing fears of meagre Christmas sales, 63% of the marketers have re-examined the plans devised early in the year and tweaked their holiday campaigns.

O2 Media established that for 71% of the respondents changes included the addition of mobile initiatives to the marketing mix, with 65% increasing their investment budgets for the channel. Slightly more than half, or 52% to be precise, allocated more money for search, while 50% did the same for online. Radio and TV marketing budgets were hiked by 22% and 15% respectively and the increase for outdoor amounted to 10%.

However, only 37% of the survey participants were revealed as having contingency budgets for the fourth quarter and 31% within that group had at their disposal less than £100,000.

Commenting on the findings, O2 Media’s commercial director Gary Cole said that the tough economic environment was forcing marketers to react quickly during a crucial sales period and strive to do their best with very limited resources.