Everybody’s crying, nobody’s buying – must be Christmas!

Welcome to the annual Christmas advertising arms race, where Britain's retailers spend a combined fortune trying to make you feel something. Anything. Preferably something involving your wallet!

But here's the thing nobody wants to admit while they're sharing the latest Christmas ad on LinkedIn with the caption "marketing excellence" - Christmas advertising has become a queue of everyone waiting to do the same thing, resulting in widespread ineffectiveness.

When one brand discovered that making people cry about Christmas could cut through the noise, it was genuinely smart. A bold differentiation strategy. Then everyone else noticed. And now we have Sainsbury's making you cry about loneliness, M&S making you cry about family, Argos making you cry about childhood, and Aldi making you cry about carrots getting wed – yes, it’s gone this far!

The problem is this: when everyone trades in the same emotional currency, that currency becomes worthless.

You remember feeling moved. You remember the warm glow of festive emotion. You remember discussing it with colleagues. What you absolutely, categorically do not remember is which retailer's particular brand of manufactured sentimentality you were responding to.

Was it the one with the lonely old man? Or the one with the lonely snowman? The lonely robin? The lonely moon? It's like the entirety of British retail has collectively decided that Christmas is about crippling isolation, and only panic-buying their specific selection of party food can cure it.

An emotional investment

Here's a fun game: without googling, tell me what made you emotionally invested in a brand during June.

Can't remember? That’s because you weren’t. Nobody is, or not to the extent that brands attempt to capture your investment during the Christmas months anyway.

This is the availability heuristic gone mad. These brands are spending millions to be hyper-available in your mind during the exact period when:

• You've already decided where you're shopping

• You're too busy to change your mind

• Every other brand is screaming for the same mental real estate

• You're mostly running on muscle memory and habit anyway

It's like spending your entire annual marketing budget on being memorable at a party where everyone's too drunk to remember who they met.

Directionless emotion

Behavioural economics tells us that peak moments create lasting memories. Christmas ads are engineered to create peak emotional moments. So far, so strategic.

But here's what they forget: the Peak-End Rule says we judge experiences by their peak moment and how they end.

Your peak moment is an animated carrot getting married, right? Beautiful. Moving. A masterclass in emotional manipulation.

But over here in reality, your end moment, once the snuggliness of loving fluffy carrots has long gone, is fighting for a parking space in a retail park in Stoke on a grey Saturday in March because you need to buy a lamp. The carrot wedding ceremony is not there. The magic is not there. There is only strip lighting, a queue for the till and the creeping sense that life is a series of utilitarian purchases punctuated by brief moments of manufactured joy. Oh, and rain, lots of rain.

The ad created a peak. The brand delivers a trough. No amount of sentimentality survives that reality gap.

So why do we do this every single year?

Because stopping would be suicide.

This is game theory. If a major retailer stopped making Christmas ads, people would notice. "Where's the Christmas ad?" they'd ask, as if the company had failed some sort of festive civic duty. Meanwhile, every competitor would continue their emotional assault, and that business would effectively cede the territory.

So, they're trapped. They must keep playing a game nobody can win, spending ever-larger budgets to achieve ever-diminishing distinctiveness, in a market where the only consistent winner is the production company making the ads.

You see the same thing in B2B. Every automotive technology company claims they're "driving the future of mobility" and "pioneering innovation." When everyone's a pioneer, nobody is. The language becomes wallpaper. But at least in B2B, you're not spending millions on making fleet managers cry about a lonely electric vehicle that just wants to find a charging point.

Christmas ads don’t work…

Here's what nobody wants to say: Christmas ads work brilliantly as entertainment and catastrophically as advertising.

They generate PR value. They create water-cooler moments. They trend on social media. They win awards. They do everything except create distinctive, durable brand associations that influence purchasing behaviour outside of a six-week window.

And perhaps the most delicious irony of all: in their desperate attempt to manufacture authentic emotion, they've created something perfectly inauthentic. We all know we're being manipulated. We discuss the manipulation. We rate the quality of the manipulation. We've turned emotional advertising into a spectator sport where we're simultaneously the audience and the target.

Christmas advertising isn't really about effectiveness anymore. It's about tradition. It's about not being the brand that broke ranks. It's about justifying marketing budgets with "cultural moments" and "share of voice" and all the other metrics we use to avoid asking the uncomfortable question:

If a fluffy carrot makes everyone cry, but nobody remembers which shop sold them the novelty carrot, did the carrot really drive sales?

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go and buy some batteries from whichever retailer made me feel something about batteries. Was that Sainsbury's? Tesco? The one with the carrots? Who can say. Bah, humbug!