Heather Bennett, executive vice president, marketing and ecommerce at Michaels, discusses early holiday shopping, inflation and the challenges of marketing in 2024 with how shoppers consume content in this exclusive interview.
Heather Bennett, executive vice president, marketing and ecommerce, at Michaels is “very pleased” with its holiday season so far. And it’s only October.
The craft retail chain debuted its holiday inventory and marketing campaigns at the start of October to get a jump start on possible 2024 holiday headwinds.
This year, only 26 days separate Thanksgiving and Christmas, compared to 31 in 2023. Fewer shopping days strain retailers to generate more revenue in a shorter window.
Plus, it’s an election year. While the early November presidential election is seven weeks before Christmas, historically, the distraction and uncertainty does impact consumer spending, Bennett said. What’s more, media expenses are elevated during this time because political campaigns are buying ad spots that retailers normally would buy.
And so, Michaels began both its Halloween and winter holiday marketing campaigns three weeks earlier than it has in the past.
Bennett sat down with Multichannel Marketer to discuss Michaels holiday strategy, plus her challenges as a marketer in 2024.
What are your goals and how do you feel about the upcoming holiday season?
Bennett: Already we have a lot of headwinds heading into the holiday season. What Michaels did specifically to help combat those is we’ve actually set our holidays much earlier than what we have in the past. So Halloween came out almost three weeks earlier. Christmas and trees have come out about that same time, almost three weeks earlier. In order to give more time for people to shop.
The customer and actually even the media at large has reacted really positively to this. This summer, there was this ‘Summerween’ trend that was being picked up by many publications with retailers. And Michaels interestingly was at the center of a lot of those conversations because we had a really fun Halloween collection that we launched. It was called ‘Hippy Hallow.’ And it was retro, it was fun pinks and oranges, but it was for spooky season.
It was just what everybody wanted at that time, to be able to start thinking about Halloween, but in a fun, retro, colorful way. And the consumer latched onto it, the media latched onto it, and it was a huge success.
Now as we’re moving into Christmas season, a little bit of that same formula is going on. We have launched our sprinkle shop, which is also a fun, colorful holiday. It is a little bit like baking inspired (with the) sprinkles.
The customer has been responding really strongly to having access to some of these things well before you would think that it’s time from a traditional retail calendar standpoint.
We’ve been very pleased by what our strategy has been, which is to really get out ahead of what we knew these headwinds were going to be. And the customer has responded very favorably.
MM: I’m surprised. I was looking on your site before this interview (on Oct. 15) and I saw you had trees and it looks like Black Friday prices.
Bennett: If you read a social post or something, they say ‘It’s too early, it’s too early.’ But many people are not thinking it’s too early or they wouldn’t be buying the trees. They’re almost ready to start celebrating their favorite holiday, whether that be Halloween or whether that be something to do with Christmas or Hanukkah.
MM: So, you’ve seen the sales have picked up for both Halloween early, and Christmas, earlier than usual?
Bennett: Yes. We seem really good response from the customers. Absolutely.
MM: Because of that, for the overall holiday season, are you feeling it’ll be a good year for Michaels?
Bennett: I mean, fingers crossed, right? It’s very early in the season, but we’ve got a lot of holiday left. We’re excited about where we are now.
MM: Going back to the election headwinds. I know the distraction is there, even though it’s so early in the holiday season, Nov. 5th?
Bennett: That election impact starts even with debates. Sales drop on the night of a debate. People just don’t go shopping. So it seems early, but really we are kind of in the thick of when there’s just a lot of media out there talking about the election, people thinking about the election. It can create a little uncertainty with folks that they don’t know what will happen next and how that might impact them in the future.
MM: I know you guys have cut your prices. Any commentary around pricing for the holiday season, discounting and shoppers wanting to pull back on spending because of inflation?
Bennett: I’m no economist, but I will say it feels with the Fed cutting interest rates, it’s good sign for what the future will hold as it relates to inflation. That doesn’t mean though that shoppers aren’t still strapped today because of the inflation that has happened since we started having issues with shortages of shipping containers and things like that all the way up until recently. There’s been a lot of inflation now inherent in food prices and a lot of raw materials that go into the other things. Everyone’s dollars go less far than they did before, and that’s certainly something that we are keeping in mind as we’re thinking about our price strategy for holiday.
MM: Will it be more discounts than ever?
Bennett: Luckily, again, with just how we market in today’s day and age, we can really monitor the situation and react accordingly. We are not necessarily planning for more discounts than ever before or less discounts than ever before, but we’re just keeping a close eye on how things are performing and making sure that we feel good with how we’re positioned against competition and against what the customer expects from Michaels.
MM: So you don’t have your Black Friday campaign ready to hit send already?
Bennett: We already started working on the creative the Black Friday. But, let’s say there’s a Christmas tree on the cover of any email that we’re going to do, that price can change pretty close before the Black Friday. So we need to know, ‘What are we featuring for Black Friday?’ We need to know, ‘Are we featuring trees?’ So that we can start to make sure that that’s included in the creative.
To wrap up, as a marketer, what is your biggest challenge right now?
Bennett: Marketing has changed so much for retail. If you think about how do retailers market, 10 years ago, especially big retailers, most of their marketing funds were a printed paper tab that got inserted into a newspaper. A lot of people thinking about how big the square is. People thinking about what page they were on versus last year, what deal to offer and the lead time that it took.
The world has 180ed since then. Now you’re in this sort of future world where digital content, the more native looking it is to the platform, the better it does.
So it could be, let’s say an influencer or even just an average person DJing in front of a screen saying, ‘Hey, look at this tree. I’m going to go buy it and it has 20,000 lights.’ And it’s nothing, right? The corporate thought that went into this paper insert, it feels almost like, ‘Wow, this is really our advertising. This is kind of what it’s come to.’
I would say one of the hardest challenges is bringing everybody along with you at the company in this new way of what success looks like.
Because again, I’ll say before when we had those printed tabs, you almost always did the same thing that you did last year. The deal at the same time, probably the same percent off, if not maybe slightly better this year if you were a little bit worried about the business. And you would know exactly what you were featuring in exactly what week, what inventory had to come in, at what point in time to make sure you were in stock because you could not be out of stock if you featured it in that tab.
There was so much planning that went into that. Again, I’m going to say now, fast forward to where we’re at today, and who knows what’s going to go viral. The world has changed so rapidly. You can’t even think about, ‘Tell me what you’re going to feature so that I know what to buy into.’ Well, I’m going to feature everything. What are you bringing in? Because it’s all going to be on there.
Just the way that people think about trends. Take bows. Bows are a very, very hot trend, which has been hard for me personally to get my head around because I’m like, what’s so trendy about a bow? We have a very viral bow garland right now. It’s literally just a garland made out of bows that are connected together with red velvet ribbon that we can’t keep in stock because bows are having moment.
The pace at which those kinds of things happen and the fact that we will now do probably 30 pieces of content on bows. We won’t have this one piece of content, that is one tab, that will go out this one point in time, and everybody will have seen it and everybody will have an opinion on it, to 30 pieces of content going out.
It’s hard for companies because there’s been such a radical change, to be able to understand how marketing today can really provide value for the company. Before you saw it, you felt it, you know exactly what it was. And here there’s proliferation of content. It’s so real time and so dynamic versus what we had before. It’s really hard to get the rest of the company to come along with you as we are responding to how people consume content and how they shop today.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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