In our second article covering how 'green' (or otherwise) Christmas 2023 was for shoppers, we focus on what shoppers DID think about, and more importantly DO. Read on to find out what people focused on and how a knowledge of current shopper priorities and behaviours can help in planning for 2024 and beyond... and NOT just for Christmas

How 'green' was Christmas 2023 for UK shoppers? We were curious about how a global pandemic and the deepest cost of living crisis since the 1970s would have affected shoppers' likelihood of incorporating thoughts of sustainability into their shopping decisions and behaviours at a time of year when the financial and behaviour costs are already racketing up. This is the first of three articles in which we share the results, and compare how sustainability issues featured in Christmas shopping vs. 2019 when we first ran the research. Here we focus on "The Cost of a Green Christmas"... read on to find out what happened and how this could influence planning for 2024 and beyond (Christmas time or otherwise).

Whilst the temptation is to bring prices down during a period of economic crisis, this is not always the most appropriate strategy... read on to understand how value can be retained by focusing, when relevant, on the rewards rather than the pain of buying.

On the 18th June 2020, I shared my thoughts on this topic on a webinar hosted by Essential Retail... and having pulled together said thoughts, decided it was a good idea to share them further… so here goes:

Donald Rumsfeld famously said that there are ‘known knowns, known unknows, and unknown unknows’ and as things stand, we sit somewhere along that spectrum when it comes to the Covid-19 crisis. There are precious few known knowns (at least as far as the general public is concerned) and we are all, including the medical / scientific community, seemingly negotiating the changing landscape of the known unknowns and unknown unknowns most of the time.

The Nobel Laureate psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, famously said that “thinking is to humans like swimming is to cats… they can do it, but they’d prefer not to”. And this is as true for humans as shoppers as it is for any other identity we take on in our daily lives.

Shopper insights in the form of category segmentations, decision hierarchies, navigational behaviour and so on have long since informed merchandising principles across multiple categories and retail sectors.

Whether it be the ‘Blue Planet Effect’, the increasingly visible actions of environmental campaign groups, the powerful simplicity of a 16 year old’s message, or the unavoidable evidence of climate change impact filling our daily news feeds…

Credit where credit’s due… I love @Insight Traction’s blogs! They tell it how it is with refreshing clarity… and, this week’s efforts struck a particular chord with me as I’d been brewing up for a mini article on a similar topic for some time.