By Guest Blogger, Donna DeClemente, Donna's Promo Talk
It's the day before Thanksgiving which means we're all getting ready to kick off the official 2010 holiday season. It's a time to reflect on the year and give thanks for what we have and to remember what we have lost. I'm a bit ambivalent about this holiday season since it will be the first one without my mom. She passed away in April from breast cancer which I wrote about on my blog here. That's a photo of her to the left. Thanksgiving was always her favorite holiday and one that she hosted at her home for many years.
However, I am thankful to be able to host Thanksgiving this year and have some of my in-laws as guests. My daughter Alex arrived home yesterday from college, so it's great to have her in the house again. The dogs were overjoyed to see her. Unfortunately my other daughter, Kelsey, won't be joining us since she's still in Florence, Italy, doing her study abroad semester. I spoke to her on Skype yesterday and she's feeling a bit homesick. She'll be home before Christmas though.
I haven't decided if I'm going to deal with any Black Friday in-store specials this year. I'll probably stick to doing most of my shopping online and spend the weekend doing some research and putting a gift list together. It's going to be a short list this year. However I have been reading that retailers are expecting consumers to really open up their wallets. The predictions are that online sales will top in-store sales for the first time. From what I've seen so far, it seems like most online retailers have been heavily marketing to women online this year and offering free shipping and other offers.
Google already has predicted what some of the hot items will be this year just by the number of searches that people have done. Electronics are always on the gift list and searches on 3D TVs rose ten times in 2010 compared with 2009, flip camcorder searches rose about 30% this year and "kids computers" rose by around 30% since this summer.
If the trends on the search engine are correct it is telling us that this year's hot toys will include Pillow Pets and Magic Orbeez Maker. Searches for Pillow Pets, stuffed animals that also function as a pillow, rose nearly 70% this year. My daughter Alex has one, Ms. Sassy Cat, which lives on her bed that she got as a gift last year. Magic Orbeez Maker are beads and pellets that grow when immersed in water and are then used to play games. Searches for this item rose 100% in the past 90 days. Here's a video of it that I found on YouTube. Another hot item may be Nerf Stampede which has been one of the fastest-rising toy searches in the past 30 days.
As far as fashion goes, Google is predicting that black will remain the hottest color beating all others by at least 50%. Red, blue, pink, green, yellow and purple follow, with green and purple being on the rise during the past six years.
So from now until the end of the year I will be writing about holiday marketing promotions, what I think is new, different, unique. I'm pretty sure they will all have a social media element as part of the program.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. Hope you enjoy the day and the weekend. I thought I'd share this dog with you which is one of my favorite Thanksgiving photos. Feel free to share your stories here, either about your holiday or your shopping experiences. Thanks again to all our readers for being here.
Great post, Donna. I think we're all more interested in shopping online (good trend to capture). And I love black (most of my clothes). I wrote about Black Friday and online shopping as well, with a charity spin: http://www.lipsticking.com/2010/11/forget-black-friday-madness-mommas-shopping-online-.html Keep up the good work!
Posted by: Amanda Ponzar | November 25, 2010 at 08:54 AM