Current Article

Should You Be Marketing At Christmas Time?

By Jim Symcox on Dec 16, 2008 in Entrepreneurs, Marketing

"When do we stop marketing for Christmas" is a question I sometimes get asked around this time of year.

It’s a perfectly fair question, after all unless you’re in retail everything starts to go quiet in the last few days before the Christmas holiday period.

And in some companies staff have put up the Christmas decorations and their feet metaphorically up on their desks and begun to wind down at the start of December.

And yet business goes on. And if we think about it there is so much interconnection between business.

For example over Christmas all the utility companies keep providing water, gas, electricity and phone services the whole time.

That means if a service breaks down it needs fixing and that may be with third part maintenance companies.

If the third party maintenance companies have vehicles or equipment that breakdown they’ll need to be fixed by mechanics, or towed away. And if people are moving between locations to repair utility services they need petrol, diesel and food around the road network. That means the motorway service stations stay open.

The staff that operate the motorway service stations need to be paid and to travel to their workplaces. And so on and on…

In the care sector. People still become ill or have to go into a home and be looked after by the home staff. Food has to be bought and prepared for them. Doctors have to attend if they become ill.

That means all those businesses will operate right up until Christmas Eve and then reduce to a still operational skeleton staff.

So you can still market to them right up until the Christmas Even close down.

Victor Kiam had an interesting example in his Book (Going for It: How to Succeed As an Entrepreneur ) where he describes how the acknowledged fact in the rag trade was that December was a "dead" month. At that time he was an inexperienced salesman so keen he didn’t realise this "truth" and made loads of sales in December!