Dear Santa, do you have my brand? A study of the brand requests, awareness and request styles at Christmas time

Abstract

Aron O'Cassis a senior lecturer at Griffith University in the school of marketing and management. He has a bachelor of commerce majoring in marketing, a master of business majoring in marketing and a PhD focusing on consumer behaviour. He has published on topics such as political marketing, voter choice, consumer brand associations, service choice behaviour. AbstractThis study examines brand awareness (preferences) and request styles (communication approaches) at Christmas of Australian children and adults. The study is founded in the growing Santa Claus literature that has examined various issues related to gift giving and request behaviour at Christmas time. The study is based on the content analysis of 422 letters written by children to Santa Claus. The results indicate that children are brandorientated in their request behaviour, adopt fairly meaningful request strategies and use visual imagery ie graphics in their communication strategies in their attempts to secure their requested gifts and specific brands.

The value of toys: 6–8-year-old children's toy preferences and the functional analysis of popular toys

“…presents the functional analysis of the five most popular toys from boys and girls. The number is based on the `dear Santa´ -studies (Bujizen & Walkenburg, 2000;Downs, 1983;Halkoaho et al 2009;Pine & Nash, 2002;O'Cass & Clarke, 2002), where the number of wishes varied between 3,5 and 7,2 with the mean settling at 4,85 toys. Based on Piaget's theory of stages of play, our hypothesis was that children would choose toys that contain representational, performative and normative elements.…”

“…The background variable examined is usually the gender of informants (Cherney & Dempsey, 2010). Children's levels of reading (Billie, 1984), the social values of surrounding society (Nelson, 2005), the degree and frequency of their exposure to toy commercials (Bujitzen & Walkenburg, 2000;Pine & Nash, 2002), and brand awareness (O'Cass & Clarke, 2002) have also been the main subject or co-subject in past studies, though -with the exception of Billie's (1984) study -gender related analysis has played a marked role in all of the works mentioned. According to Nelson (2005) there are is a body of literature indicating that girls and boys tend to prefer and choose toys that are traditionally feminine or masculine.…”

“…The first is to offer a set of actual toys or pictures of toys for children to choose from (Cherney & Dempsey, 2010;Eisenberg et al, 1982;Escudero, Robbins & Johnson, 2013). A second method has been to collect and analyze children's `Dear Santa´ -letters (Bujizen & Walkenburg, 2000;Downs, 1983;Halkoaho, Laakso, Laaksonen & Lahti, 2009;Pine & Nash, 2002;O'Cass & Clarke, 2002). A distinction can also be made between the studies where children name toys from a pool they know well (for example toys that are their own or toys at their day care center, see Hartmann & Brougère 2004) and studies where children have no or only a little 'hands on' experience of the toys (dear Santa -studies).…”

Changement climatique, authenticité et marketing des régions nordiques

“…La présence du père Noël dans les centres commerciaux, les magasins de détail et les maisons à la grandeur presque des pays développés, d'octobre à décembre, fournit par ailleurs un fort renforcement visuel à la marque et son association avec la fête de Noël encourage manifestement la consommation, l'échange de cadeaux, les dépenses et la connectivité émotionnelle avec la marque, comme partie intégrante de ce qui est appelé l'« esprit de Noël » (Clarke, 2006 ; Pourtant, bien qu'il y ait une documentation abondante sur le père Noël en tant que marque (Otnes et al, 1994 ;O'Cass et Clarke, 2002 ;Pine et Nash, 2002 ;Snellman, 2006a ;Pine et al, 2007 ;Coca-Stefaniak et al, 2008), il y a peu de débats scientifiques concernant la contribution du père Noël sur le plan de la compétitivité des destinations de latitude Nord et sur les façons dont les différentes destinations ont cherché à s'approprier ce personnage . S'appuyant sur le développe-ment du village du père Noël à Rovaniemi dans le nord de la Finlande, Michael Pretes (1995) a notamment analysé le déve-loppement de l'« industrie du père Noël » en tant que forme de tourisme postmoderne.…”

Gender on Customer Based Brand Equity: A Case of OK (Bindura) Supermarket

“…Male customers prefer recognised, fun and functional brands while female customer prefer symbolic benefit brands (Sock & Bailey, 2008;Andrew, 2002). Female customers have high recall on attractive brand logos while logos that increased recall memory were suitable to males (O'Cass & Clarke, 2001). …”