marketing, sales, seasonalIn the spirit of the seasonal business practices topic challenge:
In some businesses, a specific season can be frequently associated with much higher sales than usual. This is particularly true for the end-of-year season in the case of consumer oriented businesses.
The period is then frequently associated with (sometimes much) lower than usual sales. Examples that come to mind include toy vendors after Xmas, pumpkin dealers after Halloween, and so forth.
Question: Are there any strategies and tactics that a business which experiences this kind of seasonal sales pattern can execute to prevent sales from plunging too much?
A few decades ago, toy manufacturers were pushing toy ads on TV before Xmas, while under stocking stores in those toys. Come January, they’d re-run the same ads after adequately stocking stores.
The reasoning was to get children to ask their parents for a specific toy. The parents wouldn’t manage to locate it, so bought something else. In January, the ads would serve as a vivid reminder for the children, since it turned out they didn’t get what they were promised. The parents dutifully played along.
I’ve no idea if they still do this today, since it’s now possible to buy most toys online; sometimes you can do so from the manufacturer’s own website.
Develop additional ventures which are also calendar locked, but have spikes and valleys which balance your existing business. When I was developing software for the golf course industry, our customer’s were too busy to buy from us during the Spring and Fall, when weather everywhere favors golf. Summers and Winters made up most of our installation schedule. So we developed a similar software for the ski resort industry who were too busy during the Winter to talk to our sales people, but had plenty of time to buy from us during the Spring and Fall.
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