Around this time last year, South Coast Plaza, the luxury shopping center in Costa Mesa, Calif., posted a reel on its Instagram account that seemed more like a comedy sketch than its usual high-end marketing. It featured a person in a cutaway coat and giant rodent’s head descending an escalator, being startled by a golden toy soldier and lounging in a sleigh on an ornate carousel.
It was the Rat King — also known as the Mouse King — from “The Nutcracker,” the ballet that has become a holiday tradition in the United States and was being performed by the American Ballet Theater near the mall. The video, part of the store’s seasonal marketing campaign, garnered more than 280,000 views — and is just one example of how brick-and-mortar retailers are using social media posts and post-worthy initiatives to lure shoppers, especially during the competitive fourth-quarter period.
“Whether it’s Instagram or WeChat or TikTok, that’s where our customer is getting their information about South Coast Plaza,” said Debra Gunn Downing, the mall’s executive director of marketing, who supervises its holiday programming.
Social media, she added, “is where everyone is.”
Creating a background for selfies was presumably the idea behind a series of hand-painted PVC (polyvinyl chloride) ribbons in vivid green and cobalt blue that Samaritaine Paris Pont-Neuf, the Paris department store owned by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, commissioned this holiday season from the French artist Elsa Tomkowiak for its walls.
And on Monday the store is scheduled to unveil a giant Advent calendar with numbers positioned along the grand staircase that itself is a magnet for social media posts year-round. The surprise behind each date, some item Samaritaine wants to promote, will be revealed on the store’s Instagram Stories or by scanning a sales receipt.
Even the store’s Art Nouveau facade on Rue de la Monnaie has been made holiday-ready, with its windows illuminated daily through Jan. 6 with another set of ribbons, these made with gold-tinted aluminum composite panels and LED strips.
“That is super Instagrammable already,” Yann Wattel, Samaritaine’s creative director, said about the store’s ornate building exterior, “but since Christmas 2024, we’ve tried to invest a lot on the facade for the pleasure of the customers, but also to be sure that we can be published on social media.” (Last year the exterior decoration included a massive peacock.)
The strategy seems to be working, with the store saying that its impressions — the number of times an image appeared on viewers’ screens — had increased 67 percent between Nov. 1 and Dec. 31, 2024, compared with the same period in 2023.
Many retailers use Instagram to post displays of holiday mainstays such as lavishly ornamented Christmas trees. The Spanish retailer El Corte Inglés, whose profile lists 1.2 million followers, posted images along those lines multiple times this month. (Some of those same images were also posted on the store’s category-specific accounts, including @elcorteingleshome, which has more than 470,000 followers.)
And this month The Grove — the popular open-air mall in Los Angeles that includes stores like Nordstrom and Nike — posted a TikTok video to promote its tree lighting, an event featuring a faux snow flurry that annually attracts thousands of people. In its first week on the site, the video garnered more than 170,000 views.
“We’ve got to be strategic and thoughtful in the way that we post about it,” said Jackie Levy, the chief financial and revenue officer for Caruso, which owns and operates The Grove as well as eight other retail centers in California. “We want to be authentic to what it is.”
Experts say that keeping holiday posts festive but not focused on sales is an effective strategy.
“You really want to combine function and fashion,” said Katie Thomas, who oversees the Kearney Consumer Institute, a division of the management consulting group Kearney. “You don’t want it to be just about a narrative or a story or decoration without anything backing it up. You don’t want it to be too branded either.”
The Grove’s management said impressions of its Instagram posts more than tripled between the last two months of 2024 and the two months that preceded them. Its holiday programming generates other posts, too: On Oct. 27, for example, a post about the installation of its 100-foot white fir Christmas tree appeared on @losangeles.explores, generating more than 2,300 likes.
With social media in mind, retailers are “creating an event that becomes shareworthy, which ultimately becomes an attention-getter,” said Marshal Cohen, the chief retail adviser at Circana, a market research firm whose headquarters are in Chicago. “It becomes subliminal selling and then ultimately transforms into a conversion to a purchase.”
A survey released by Circana in October said nearly a third of the American shoppers who responded said they follow brands on social media, while nearly a quarter said they follow retailers. Influencers still matter too: Sixty percent of the respondents who follow influencers said that they are likely to make purchases based on their recommendations.
And different social media platforms do attract different audiences. TikTok, for example, is what “the younger customers take a lot of inspiration from,” said Claudia D’Arpizio, a senior partner and global head of fashion and luxury at Bain & Company. “Instagram tends to be a bit more refined and attract a more sophisticated consumer.”
With that in mind, many retailers rely on multiple platforms. South Coast Plaza said it posts on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and — with its Chinese clientele in mind — Weibo, WeChat and Xiaohongshu, the Chinese site colloquially known as Little Red Book. The goal is, as Ms. Gunn Downing put it, “having that wide variety of programming really talks to a lot of constituency.”
It may seem ironic, but social media has become an inherent part of the way that physical stores do business, especially during the holidays.
“They have to bring the digital experience into the equation,” Mr. Cohen of Circana said. “It’s no longer good enough to just put an item on the shelf and hope that the brand got you enticed by the product.”
“You can’t just have Santa Claus sitting under the tree anymore,” he added.
Instead, he said, retailers “have to utilize different methods of display, different methods of communication and different methods of technology.”
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