The holiday season is a time when people get all cozy and watch the television but one thing you can count on after turning on that TV is commercials. Commercials are just one form of advertising that gets put out by big companies, and there is no doubt that this advertising changes during the holiday season. These ads mostly try to pull in the Christmas crowd. There were still a lot of questions about why certain things were chosen to represent Christmas in media.
I went to Ms. Blok, our marketing teacher, to ask some questions about Christmas advertising. When asked why the most dominant colors of Christmas were green and red she said that “red is a color that draws people’s attention while green is a more peaceful color.”
The red is used to get people to look at your company or product and the green is used to remind you that the holidays are coming and you might need one more gift. I then asked Blok what was one thing she thought was essential to marketing to the Christmas crowd. She responded that she would try to always include a symbol that harkens back to the origin of Christmas, also known as the birth of Christ.
Later on in the interview, she talked about how big businesses were starting to move more towards using Santa over Jesus in advertising. This is true to some extent but there is a reason companies do this. Companies use less religious material because not everyone who celebrates Christmas is a Christian; in fact, a lot of non-Christians celebrate Christmas. According to a poll done by the Pew Research Center, 81% of people who are not Christians celebrate Christmas. This means that if you were to use a religious symbol as a main part of a marketing campaign you would be missing out on a large portion of your target market. This is bad for companies’ profits because they would lose money for every customer who is turned off by religion. This means companies have two options. They can use a religious symbol and lose out on some profit, or use Santa and have everyone be happy and buy products.
The Christmas season is also great for sales so losing out on any profit during the Christmas season is a deal breaker. Christmas marketing has a lot of thought that goes into it behind the scenes that most people don’t know about.
