Hard to believe, but Holiday 2016 is behind us. Those words look nothing short of strange on the page. But the ceaseless passing of time aside, we must now try to decode what just transpired. Did 2016’s holiday season deliver us any real lessons from which to learn going forward?

I think it did. And you may not agree with some of these, but after a little time reflecting on a combination of hard data, anecdotal experiences, and the type of relentless marketing that can only find you when you’re taking time away from the office and actually living your life, here are a few that stuck with me.

#1. People Are Sick Of Feeling Undeserving

It will be quite some time before the real numbers are in. But just a few days before Christmas, Forbes published a piece cobbled together from such sources as Deloitte, American Express, and the NRF predicting a $1 trillion holiday season. That’s insane. The average amount US adults planned to spend on holiday items: $419.

And as the bifurcation of wealth distribution continues in this country (politics are debatable, the fact that the rich are getting richer while many people struggle is no longer up for argument), $419 during a time of palpable geopolitical uncertainty seems quite a lot. So just as we saw in 2010 when people grew tired of 2008’s recession and just started shopping whether they had the resources to or not, people are once again shopping their troubles away.

Which leads to the next lesson I took away.

#2. The Hippies Lost: Happiness = Stuff… And We’re All Stuff Experts

Maybe I’ve been blind to the severity of this for years, but I genuinely doubt it. Ask anyone who knows me well what I’m best at in life and they’ll tell you pattern recognition – particularly as it relates to human behavior. And no matter where I was this holiday season or who I was with, I heard people talking about products more than any other time in my life. Brand ambassadors, all of us. Savvy friends trying to convert luddites to Prime membership. Older family members bonding over how much the gift of Alexa has enhanced their daily routine. And endless, endless lobbying on the part of one entertainment series advocate trying to get another to give “their ” show a chance. Reflect on your own holiday conversations, the ones with the smartest and most favorite people you know and love. If you were lucky, you avoided political topics. But how many were about ideas, books, art, music… even sports? And how many were about TV shows, movies, stores, or what people were gonna get with all those gift cards? And thanks to the digital world, even my youngest nieces and nephews, once easy to buy for, have become far too expert on every facet of the products they covet – gift cards for them, too.

Personally, I try to tell myself I don’t subscribe to this notion in any way. I tell myself I try to live simply, and that I’d much prefer to identify with the trend we hear so much about in generations far younger than mine: that an experience far outweighs a product.

But here’s the thing, it’s complete hypocrisy, and it leads to my next takeaway: an awful lot of the experiences we’re all talking about require an awful lot of products.

#3. The Greater The ‘Experience’ You Can Tie Into, The More You’ll Sell

This should be obvious, sure. But, for me, at least, 2016 brought it home hard. I do a lot of outdoorsy things. Always have. But every place I visited this year that has anything to do with tapping into people’s desires to break from the routine and live a little “bigger ” had a much-better-than-usual holiday season. REI? On Fire. Patagonia? Set a single day sales records back in November with its pledge to donate 100% of Black Friday sales to earth-friendly causes. How big, you ask? $10 million in one day. A local high-end ski shop down the street from me called Ski Monster just opened a few years ago, and has been struggling a bit. This holiday season they couldn’t enforce their 9PM close time several nights until midnight.

And the four times I went to various mountains over holiday break I found parking lots overflowing into places they never had and lift lines like nothing anyone – including longtime resort employees – had ever seen. One mountain had to stop selling ski lift tickets at 10am. That’s unheard of.

Takeaways

Chances are, there’s a very small chance you own and operate a ski mountain. Or that you sell ice climbing equipment and snow-specific mountain bikes. So what does this all mean for the average retailer trying to make sense of Holiday 2016?

That’s where I think my musings tie together. It’s no secret that you’ll always sell better to someone when you can speak their language: someone whose psychology you understand. And if I were a retailer today, regardless of what I was selling, I’d start thinking about how I could fold these trends into my marketing. Because, for right now at least, people want to spend, they want to feel important, and they really, really want to feel like they are living a life less ordinary.

All while watching never-before-seen amounts of “TV “.

I’d spend some time figuring out how your brand can leverage these trends going forward, and I expect I’ll have some musings on in-media product placement – for retailers – in the near future.