The 2024 holiday season is shaping up to be as dynamic and turbulent as it has been in recent years, but in different ways. Knowing what to expect and proper planning can help make the best of another tough holiday season.

Here are our predictions for 12 trends to account for as you plan your holiday customer experience and digital marketing campaigns:

Consumer Finances Are Stretched

While inflation is way down, record-high household and credit card debt, coupled with the highest interest rates in a generation, have consumers feeling financially overextended. And despite continued solid economic growth, most working class consumers aren’t feeling nearly as optimistic as wealthier consumers.

Supply Chain Problems

Just when we got over all the pandemic-era supply chain pressures, new challenges have risen. Houthi rebels have diverted traffic away from the Suez Canal. Drought has limited traffic through the Panama Canal. That’s made for longer container transit times and caused container shipping rates to jump four-fold or more in some cases. Looming strike threats by dock, longshore, & rail workers in US, Canada, and Germany may make things worse before they get better.

New Tech Capabilities

Since last holiday season, you’ve likely added some new capabilities to your martech stack, whether it’s a customer data platform, AI, advanced performance analytics, or something else. Make sure that you’re leveraging these new tools this holiday season.

Privacy Constraints

On the downside, the third anniversary of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection is putting pressure on brands to extend their already-stretched email engagement windows to 36 months or beyond. Doing that will increase their deliverability risks substantially. On the upside, Link Tracking Protection is a non-issue for most senders (including Oracle Responsys and Eloqua customers), and while Google is giving Chrome users the option to block third-party cookies, that’s unlikely to affect brands this holiday season.

1st-Party Audience-Building

Building first-party audiences is more important as privacy protections increase and third-party audiences become more challenging to build and monetize. The holiday season attracts lots of new customers, but many disengage or opt out of channels when the season is over.

Get our checklist of 18 different types of audience acquisition sources to explore via free, no-form download.

Gen Z

Born between 1997 and 2012, Gen Z accounts for 24% of the US population. While it only accounts for 17% of US spending today, it’s projected to become the wealthiest generation ever, making it a strategic demographic to connect with. More than other generations, Gen Z values individual expression and diversity, ethical sourcing and sustainability, and the opinions and recommendations of influencers.

Early Start to Holidays

It’s not really a new trend, but it’s a trend that’s gotten stronger and stayed strong since the start of the pandemic. It’s not just that campaigns have become more productive in October, but also that December campaigns have gotten weaker.

The Amazon Effect

Amazon’s October Prime Big Deal Days, which are likely to be Oct. 8-9, is helping reinforce consumers’ early holiday shopping tendencies. And then in December, the speed of Prime shipping is giving Amazon a huge advantage as other retailers end guaranteed Christmas delivery mid-month. It’s a devastating one-two punch.

Presidential Election Year

In 2020, we saw retailers pull back considerably on their email campaigns during election week, when the winner was in doubt and tensions were high. While the campaigns that were sent performed well, those retailers ran the risk of seeming insensitive to the anxiety that many Americans felt. Tensions are running high for this presidential election, too.

Evolving Store Experiences

Store traffic has rebounded from its pandemic slump. Plus, increasingly important Gen Z is particularly fond of in-store shopping. However, online sales continue to grow much faster than store sales and that has retailers thinking of new ways to evolve their in-store experiences and use their store footprints differently.

Q5

The period from Christmas Day through the middle of January, the so-called “fifth quarter” is prime time for redeeming gift cards and for gift returns and exchanges. During this time, “Get what you really wanted” messaging is common. And because of clearances, prices are attractive to deal-seekers and self-gifters.

How to navigate the post-holiday “fifth quarter” successfully.

More Holistic Measurement

Measuring the success of your customer experiences and digital marketing efforts is more difficult than ever. New privacy protections are reducing our visibility. And new channels and growing omnichannel shopping behaviors are making customer journeys and shopping interactions more complex.

Explore multi-touch attribution models.

Want our advice on how to respond to those trends?

We discuss all of those trends in more detail in our companion on-demand webinar on holiday trends, which also includes recommendations on how to respond to each of our 12 trends.

We hope you enjoyed “12 Trends a-Trending: What to Plan For This Holiday Season.” Some of our other on-demand webinars include:

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Need help planning for the holidays or executing your campaigns? Oracle Digital Experience Agency has hundreds of marketing and communication experts ready to help Responsys, Eloqua, Unity, and other Oracle customers create stronger connections with their customers and employees—even if they’re not using an Oracle platform as the foundation of that experience. With a 94% satisfaction rate, our clients are thrilled with the award-winning work our creative, strategy, and other specialists do for them, giving us an outstanding NPS of 82.

For help overcoming your challenges or seizing your opportunities, talk to your Oracle account manager, visit us online, or email us at OracleAgency_US@Oracle.com.

This post is updated annually. Last year’s version was published on July 28, 2023 by Clint Kaiser, Kaiti Gary, JT Capps, and Chad S. White.