Commentary

Holidays On Ice

Santa Claus is coming to town ... even if he has downsized the sleigh. While economists say that we're moving out of the recession, that's largely due to a GDP bump from the stimulus package, not to a sizeable rise in consumer spending. Today's more wary and wise consumers have yet to pick up the pace on spending. They have also adopted new behaviors to help ensure they control their finances. It's up to savvy marketers to interpret the related implications and retool accordingly.

In hindsight, consumers appeared shell-shocked during the 2008 holiday season. The October 2009 Consumer Reports Holiday Shopping Poll found that only 38 percent bothered to create a holiday budget last year - instead presumably opting to put their wallets on lockdown. If that behavior represented denial, 2009 behavior indicates we've reached acceptance: 50 percent of consumers are now budgeting, and there's some small movement toward increased spending - though not much. Still, a tentative, measurable improvement over 2008 does seem present; in 2008, 76 percent of consumers said that they were scaling back spending, which has tapered to 68 percent in 2009.

Occasionally, we survey About.com users to probe for the nuances that underlie these broad statistical findings. Our most recent Holiday Shopping and Travel study findings reveal several new strategies consumers are using to ensure that they continue to moderate their spending. Most interesting is the extended shopping season. A whopping 40 percent of respondents started holiday shopping prior to September, in order to pace spending with their paychecks and avoid overspending, which can be an inevitable downside of last-minute shopping.

Users also told us that they are researching their purchases more than they did last year, using comparison shopping tools such as PriceGrabber and ConsumerSearch.com. Mobile is also an increasingly popular tool in consumers' shopping toolkit: between one-quarter to one-third of shoppers are using their cell phones to research products, evaluate reviews and get ratings.

While the shock of the recession seems to be over and anxieties about the economy slowly easing, Americans' angst over jobs has risen sharply (35 percent, up from 17 percent). The consumer is now (at least for the moment) - transformed: cautious, deliberate, even methodical. As noted by Google's Head of Marketing for Retail, Sara Kleinberg, "They're going to have their gifts but they want to be careful about what they buy and they're going to do their research."

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