Jingle Smells : Retailer Gimmicks Entice Shoppers’ Holiday Dollars

You can bet your billfold that the scent of hot cider wafting through the otherwise stuffy air of your favorite mall this holiday season is no accident.

The sights, sounds and smells--yes, smells--of Christmas are being pumped into malls and retail stores from Los Angeles to New York to Cleveland. And if you think you’re suffering sensory overload when you do your Christmas shopping this year, it’s not your imagination.

With the economy still shaky, retailers are working overtime to concoct ways to entice consumers through their doors. They’re baking Christmas cookies. Brewing hot cider. Hoisting 40-foot, fake Christmas trees. Piping in holiday Muzak. Displaying everyday gifts in festive baskets. Offering valet parking. And the biggest enticement of all: free gift wrap.

“What they are providing consumers with is a definition of what the holiday is supposed to mean,” said Jerald Jellison, professor of social psychology at USC. “It’s an assault on the senses with one basic message: The way to celebrate Christmas is to buy things.”

Behind all this is simple mathematics. Most retailers expect to post about 40% of their annual sales during the holiday season and up to 50% of their yearly profits, said John Riordan, executive vice president of the International Council of Shopping Centers.

“Consumers are very susceptible to being seduced into the holiday spirit,” said Gerald Celente, founder of the Trends Research Institute. “They want to believe in the perfect holiday. They really believe they can go over the river and through the woods.”

Perhaps no single retail chain has honed the art of Christmas shopping into a finer science than Williams-Sonoma, a kitchenware chain that turns all 112 of its stores nationwide into veritable grandmothers’ kitchens at holiday time. We’re talking fresh-baked Christmas cookies. Homemade cinnamon breads. And hot apple cider--50,000 gallons’ worth of it.

“Shoppers fight traffic. They dodge other shoppers. Then, when they get to the mall, they can’t even find a place in the mall to sit down and have a Coke,” said Gary Friedman, president of the San Francisco-based chain, which has several Southern California shops, including one at Los Angeles’ Beverly Center. “When they come into our store, we want to get them into the spirit.”

That’s the spirit of buying, of course. All those free cookies help sell lots of cookie cutters, Friedman said. And the hot cider never fails to boost sales of mulling spices.

Executives at Body Shop, a chain of stores selling scented bath products, lotions and the like, know that consumers often buy with their noses. That’s why Andrew Graham, who owns the Body Shop store at Westside Pavilion, is distraught that the special Christmas potpourri he ordered hasn’t arrived.

Instead, Graham is taking a holiday tip from the fruit basket industry: His stores have temporarily removed soaps and scented items from conventional displays and wrapped them in decorative wicker baskets that sell for up to $100.

“There is a tendency for people to buy more when they see our products displayed like this,” Graham said.

But perhaps nothing attracts shoppers during the holidays like free gift wrapping. In fact, free gift wrap was the top holiday shopping lure cited by consumers in a recent poll of 900 people nationwide by the New York research firm Yankelovich Partners.

Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s wrap gifts for free over the holidays. Several malls do too. Seventh Market Place in downtown Los Angeles is wrapping gifts for free. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the mall expects to wrap 15,000 gifts at no charge, said Liz Dion, senior marketing manager.

But not all holiday gimmicks work. Westside Pavilion tried an eggnog giveaway several years back, but it was all gone in minutes.

Then there was the zebra Santa brought with him to the same mall a few years ago. The zebra panicked and had to be removed moments after it arrived.

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Perhaps one of Westside Pavilion’s most successful holiday promotions this year is free valet parking on weekends, said Mary Lankester, senior marketing director.

But most malls know that the flash of holiday decorations is what draws many families at Christmastime. Nationally, an entire industry has sprung up around Christmas decorations made for malls.

The sprawling Mall of America in Minneapolis spent more than $1 million on its lavish, Peanuts-themed holiday display. At the center of the mall is a 24-foot-high doghouse with Snoopy climbing a 24-foot-tall Christmas tree that springs from the doghouse.

That motif was created by Baltimore-based Becker Group, which also oversaw the holiday design at Beverly Center this year--including the 40-foot harlequin figures hanging outside the mall.

The designs were specifically crafted to catch the eye of entertainment industry executives who frequently shop at the mall, said Evette Caceres, mall marketing director.

With all this fake ornamentation, real Christmas trees have become almost nonexistent in malls. Trees are difficult to keep alive and are often viewed as fire hazards.

Yet plastic or fiberglass Christmas decorations can turn off as many consumers as they attract. So for years, one Cleveland-area mall--Beachwood Place--erected a so-called Poinsettia Tree. The “tree” was actually made of many thousands of carefully composed individual poinsettia plants. Each year, shoppers returned to marvel at the flower sculpture.

But the plants became difficult to care for. And merchants in the mall’s upper level complained about shoppers who stayed downstairs to stare at the tree. So this year, the mall dispersed the poinsettias throughout the mall. But not necessarily with full public approval.

“I get six or seven calls a day from people asking me, ‘What happened to the Poinsettia Tree?’ ” said Karen Carmen, marketing director at Beachwood Place. “Even my own mother called me and complained about it.”