12 November 2025
Lock the baseline before you draw the Christmas chart
Why year-on-year Christmas charts fall apart when last year’s store openings stay in the baseline.
Christmas charts attract more opinions than any other season. The usual failure is not colour choice — it is a baseline that still includes last year’s store openings, one-off gift-with-purchase events, or a channel that no longer exists.
Before we ink a Holiday pack, we ask three questions:
- Which stores or regions are comparable to last year?
- Which promotions were unique and should be footnoted, not buried in the total?
- Which attribution window will finance defend in January?
Only after those answers are written down do we draw the channel mix. Teams that skip this step spend the wash-up arguing about the axis instead of the season.
If you are commissioning a Seasonal Campaign Performance Chart Pack for Holiday, send last year’s footnotes with the first extract — it saves a full revision cycle.