The marketing of Christmas past is still relevant today

The holiday season is an important time for marketers. It’s one of the most frenzied shopping periods of the year, and whatever you’re trying to sell, people are probably looking to buy. That means competition. And competition tends to mean innovation.

As time passes and advertising and media evolve, delivery methods change. The way we communicate with potential customers changes. But for the past 120 years or so, one thing hasn’t changed. The traditional Christmas window display is still a part of the December scenery in major cities around the world. Why has a seemingly outdated marketing strategy held on so tenaciously? Why hasn’t innovation pushed it out in favor of something more modern?

The genesis of “window shopping”

The window display has been around almost as long as Christmas itself, in its modern form, has been. The celebration has wide-ranging roots, with many of the traditions we associate with Christmas today actually predating the birth of Jesus. But while Christmas as a Christian holiday has been celebrated in one way or another for centuries, it was actually banned in England and parts of the American colonies, and didn’t fully catch on until the late 1800s. In 1885 it was declared a national holiday. That’s when Christmas started to become what we know it as today.

Not long before that, the window display was born. The Industrial Revolution brought many technological advances to America, and one was the ability to create larger and larger single sheets of glass. Store owners were able to use this plate glass to put large windows in their shops at ground level, where they could display some of their wares to entice passersby to come in and buy.

As Victoria Lewis notes, Macy’s was at the forefront of the Christmas phenomenon. R.H. Macy himself came up with the idea of bringing Santa Claus into the store in 1862, and in 1874 he created the very first holiday window display – a collection of porcelain dolls from around the world paired with scenes from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

As the decade and century turned, more and more of the nation’s biggest retailers competed not only to attract customers during the Christmas season, but to out-do one another with bigger and better window displays. Lord and Taylor, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Bergdorf Goodman in New York. Marshall Field’s in Chicago. Selfridges and Harrods in London. All of them joined the fray, and they helped to take the display from simple advertising to a phenomenon to part of the fabric of Christmas in the city.

The changing face of advertising

People have complained about the overcommercialization of Christmas for more than a century – it’s by no means a new development. Just like the development of the plate glass window made the window display itself possible, the Industrial Revolution also affected what itself Christmas is (beyond its religious meaning, of course). With the ability to produce more and more goods, someone had to sell them, and someone had to buy them. Christmas provided a perfect opportunity to move some products. Queen Victoria’s England pioneered this:

[regQuote quote=”Being a nation of manufacturers, industrialists and shopkeepers, it was not long before Victorians realised that Christmas, with its emphasis on generosity and hospitality, could be exploited for commercial possibilities.” borders=”False”]

By the turn of the century, festivities commenced when the shopping season began. Advent Sunday, Christmas Eve, the First Night of Christmas, Twelfth Night, the dates by which the church signalled and measured the season, were pushed aside by the new development of mass consumerism. The clarion call of Christmas was being heard earlier and earlier thanks to the desire of retailers to maximise their profits.

That, of course, meant more than just shop windows would be needed to bring customers in. Print advertising – still in its relative infancy – became an important part of the department store Christmas extravaganza. In fact, the way Santa Claus looks today didn’t come from ancient tradition – it came from Haddon Sundblom’s Coca-Cola ads, starting in 1931. The famed story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was also born in print advertising, as part of a Montgomery Ward giveaway in 1939.

Santa and Rudolph and all the others wouldn’t stay only in print forever, as the advent of radio and then television sped up the changing world of advertising. The Rudolph TV special, along with others like

A Charlie Brown Christmas and How the Grinch Stole Christmas, didn’t just become an integral part of the holiday season for many families, but also became important advertising vehicles. According to William M. O’Barr, “sponsoring a holiday special enables advertisers to encourage purchasing gifts for loved ones while viewers bask in the sentimental, non-commercial messages of the story.” Today the emphasis is placed on digital advertising online, in addition to television.

From department stores to online

The way people shop has changed drastically over the decades as well, and is still changing. In the early days of the commercial American Christmas, the best option for shoppers was the department store – and in some cases the only real option. But in the second half of the 20th century, stores like Walmart, Kmart, and Target sprang up, grew, and took over the retail space. Today Walmart is not only the largest retailer in the world, but the largest company by revenue.

In the late 1990s, the dotcom bubble initiated a shift in consumer attention to the Internet. Many companies changed tactics to include online sales, and others formed with a purely online presence with no brick-and-mortar shops. Some, like Pets.com, failed miserably. Others, like Amazon, experienced wild success, and played a major part in changing what retail looks like today. This year, Amazon passed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the country (as measured by market capitalization).

Holiday nostalgia reigns supreme

The point is that the landscape of retail – and really, business as a whole – is vastly different from what it was a century and a half ago. So with all the changes in how people buy and how businesses sell at Christmas over the decades, why is the window display still important in 2015?

In a word, the answer is nostalgia. Nostalgia is a huge part of what makes Christmas and the holiday season what it is. The secular part of the holiday is built around family and childhood, after all, so it’s only natural that thoughts turn to the past. Almost as long as the holiday has been around in the United States, the imagery surrounding it has evoked fond feelings of Christmases past.

Ask anyone about their favorite Christmas traditions, and you’ll likely get a detailed answer, and it won’t be simply “opening presents.” This isn’t always the case for holidays – Halloween is for costumes, Independence Day is for fireworks, but there’s not typically that much variation. But most families have unique things that they do every year to celebrate Christmas, if they celebrate it at all. No matter how much everything else in our lives changes, my family always goes to downtown Indianapolis on Christmas Eve to see the tree on Monument Circle. We did it in 1998, we did it in 2008, we’ll do it in 2015. No matter what the world looks like, we’ll do that every year as long as we can.

Once something becomes a part of the fabric of what we think of when we think of Christmas, it’s not likely to go away. For many people, particularly city-dwellers, going to see the different displays is a part of their family Christmas tradition. It’s something that’s transcended marketing or advertising, in a way, sort of like how Super Bowl commercials are an event in and of themselves.

And that’s exactly what you should shoot for with your marketing. Everything isn’t going to be the Super Bowl or Christmas. The things you create aren’t likely to become part of our national story, and that’s okay. But they can certainly be more than marketing. They can tell a story, and gain a following. A mascot can become beloved. A commercial can bring tears to your eye. If your marketing does more than just list the reasons your product is great, it stands a chance. Give people something to hold onto. They might just never let go.