Retail Holiday Shopping Trends Highlighted in Two New Research Reports

Don’t tell anyone but in a few days it will be Thanksgiving and the day after that, Friday, has become to be known as Black Friday for apparently there’s a whole lot of sales that go on this day. Obviously the entire world, essentially, knows that this is the time of year where people have visions of sales, savings and discounts dancing in their heads as they plow through their holiday shopping list.

This year, we’re pleased as punch (yes pleased as punch) to provide you with not one, but two research reports on the topic of holiday shopping and consumers and all that good stuff. In fact, one of the two papers is Part 1 of a two-part paper.

The first report is the Oracle Pulse Report: The Who, What and Chatter of Holiday Electronics Shoppers. In short, the report takes the Pulse of what online shoppers look like for the 2014 holiday season, products they want to buy and preferred brands by examining a popular retail category: consumer electronics.

There are some great visuals in the paper to help visualize these concepts and trends:
Download your copy of the report today.

The second report is entitled: Holiday Research 2014 Part 1: Unwrapping Shopper Plans. This report, which was done in partnership with Edison Research, looks at, well better yet, read this verbatim from the Abstract:

In the fall of 2014, Oracle Marketing Cloud and Edison Research began a multi-phase study to examine the habits of holiday shoppers. Unlike previous, snapshot studies of consumer intent or self-reported behavior, this project involves both quantitative and qualitative studies of the same sample of consumers during two distinct time periods: October, when consumers are generally in the planning stages, and mid-December, when consumers have either largely finished or are still actively engaged in holiday shopping.

Translation: This will be unlike other studies that ONLY look at shoppers’ intent before the holidays. It will also look at what actually occurred and then explore the reasons why intent did not match reality.

Part 1 analyzes purchase intent. Here’s a taste of the insights you will see:

• On the average, the amount of money shoppers plan to spend this year is slightly higher than what they reported spending last year.
• Compared to last year, men plan to spend more while women plan to spend less on aver- age.
• Most shoppers who plan to spend more cite “more people to buy presents for” as the top reason, while those who intend to spend less would do so mainly because of a change in their financial situation.

Download the Oracle Pulse Report: The Who, What and Chatter of Holiday Electronics Shoppers AND Holiday Research 2014 Part 1: Unwrapping Shopper Plans today.