Are you marketing thinking beyond the current season when everyone’s in the buying mindset, or are you fixated on the present and the potential easy pickings the Christmas shopper represents?

If you’re like most business owners you’ll be following the traditional pattern of selling hard until close of business on the 24^th, and then discounting massively for the January Sales.

I think that’s a piss-poor strategy, even if you have excess stock you want to shift to make room for the new. There are better ways of shifting it than at a massive discount – like using it as a premium for more expensive items, for example.

Fact is, if you’re selling at a discount you’re massively reducing your profits – and the lower your margins, the more this discount is going to hurt. You might argue you “have to” join in the January Sales because that’s what everyone else does, but that’s just an excuse for being lazy in your thinking.

Now, I’m not saying the New Year isn’t a good excuse or theme for some kind of promotion – because it is, especially in some industries like the weight-loss industry and all manner of self-improvement scams.

But a “January Sale” is about as imaginative and eye-catching as Dad’s socks at Christmas, and it’s even worse when everyone else is singing the same tune. In fact, as an aside, if you’re determined to have a January sale, have the damned thing in March or something and come up with some excuse why you didn’t have it before. Only don’t have a sale – just call it one.

Or be smart and say, “we can’t call this a January sale because it’s not January and it’s not a sale. No, it’s a Mad March Super Premium. See we don’t have January Sales because…”. You get the idea.

On balance I reckon most business owners would be better off using the quiet time in January to implement, or at least start implementing the marketing strategies, tactics and campaigns they should have been thinking about and working on in December.

Why?

Because in my experience many, many business owners effectively give up doing anything between the Sales and Valentine’s Day in February.

And marketing, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

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