The Power of Retail

Are you an avid ad watcher? I love to track trends and fads through changing ads and ad watching in the holiday season is a good time to check out the best and the brightest of them. According to a new study conducted by BIGresearch, holidays ads of Target, Wal-Mart and Macy’s are customer favorites this year. The study was done for the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association and the executive director of RAMA, Make Gatti said that TV ads are no longer the only way retailers are getting customer’s attention.

Some ads are so great that shoppers decide to purchase an item based solely on an ad, but the percentage of these shoppers was still rather small at only 17.1%, for most shoppers (31.5%) they had already decided to shop at the merchant so the ad was not the sole incentive. With a tough holiday season this year, barely a 2% increase in retail sales, marketers are doing anything and everything this year to get shoppers to part with their money.

“It’s a difficult period because consumers are still overextended with credit, and gas and energy prices are still high,” said Britt Beemer, founder and chairman of America’s Research Group, Charleston, S.C. According to ARG, about three fourths of Americans have 75% or more of their Christmas shopping completed. But more shoppers than ever (53.4%) are waiting to get bigger discounts, up from 37.9% in 2006.

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