Holiday Shopping Reveals More Than What Customers Buy: How Holiday Moments Can Create More Meaningful First-Party Data
October 2026
On Monday, Target announced its latest iteration of its holiday toy catalog. Alongside the classic printed book, families can browse a digital catalog, save items to wish lists, and share them with friends and family. QR codes connect printed pages to the digital catalog, and a new in-app scanner can turn a handwritten wish list into a digital one.
I’m one of those folks who loves an old-school printed catalog. I enjoy watching my son carefully pore over each page with his marker. The option of making it easy to find and send the item saves a moment for my family.
The holidays not only bring a change in shopping behavior, they can also bring more emotion. Browsing for toys can evoke memories of our own childhood holidays while helping us create new ones with our families. For marketers, that combination creates a great opportunity to understand customers better; however, it also makes it easier to get it wrong. We’ve probably all bought a gift for someone else, only to receive messages about that category for months afterward. A thoughtful purchase becomes a misleading signal about our own interests. This is the kind of targeted marketing that makes customers cringe.
Wish lists can add nuance that a transaction alone cannot provide. When customers identify who a list is for, brands can better distinguish gift shopping from personal preferences. If purchase information is connected, it may also help distinguish what has been bought from what remains on the list. But an unpurchased item isn’t automatically a relevant recommendation for the next holiday as interests and context changes.
Any brand that sees a shift in behavior during the holidays has an opportunity to collect and interpret first-party data more thoughtfully. Here are a few questions you can ask:
Can we discern everyday shopping from holiday shopping? What signals or rules should we put in place before the season begins?
If a customer buys from a category once during the holidays and never again, should that purchase be removed from future recommendations?
What is our version of a wish list: a useful experience that helps customers while giving us better context?
Your approach doesn’t need to be as involved as a wish list. A few suggestions include:
A short poll about who customers are shopping for, what they’re looking for, or how they celebrate
A request for comments or pictures around how your products fit into their holidays
Optional sign-ups for content or offers around specific interests, such as gifts for coffee lovers or outdoor adventurers
A review of website and email clicks alongside purchase history to identify seasonal shifts in interest
An on-brand holiday event or in-store experience with an easy registration process or onsite data collection
A simple way for customer service teams to record whether a purchase was a gift when interacting with a customer
Each activation should have a clear purpose and give customers a reason to participate.
Stay open-minded about what you learn. Survey responses, transactions, and click behavior may together reveal an opportunity for a message, journey, or offer you hadn’t considered. They may also reveal which messages you should stop sending.
Of course, data collection involving children and family details deserves particular care. Brands should collect only what they need, explain how it will be used, and protect it. A helpful gift reminder can quickly feel intrusive if it includes personal details a customer didn’t expect the brand to use.
What Target ultimately does with the data generated through this experience remains to be seen. Its catalog announcement focuses on the new features for customers rather than a specific personalization strategy. Still, Target’s catalog is a reminder that the best first-party data strategies can begin with an experience customers find useful. When a brand makes an emotional moment easier or more enjoyable, customers may share valuable information along the way. The responsibility is to use that data to make the next experience more helpful and not simply to demonstrate how much is known.