A Simple Guide to How Public Holidays Work

Surprisingly enough, one of those little things that can trip people up when planning marketing is the public holiday system. While we all look forward to it, most people don’t allow for how they can effect when work can be completed and when people are more likely to spend money on things. As I’ve got to know the system quite well dealing with it when creating calendar templates every year, I’m writing this little guide to help you understand it.

Fixed dates

These ones never change their date but do change the day of the week they fall on due to the fact that our year is 52 weeks + 1 day long (or 2 days in leap years). You can see this when you look at the calendar over a number of years. New Year’s Day fell on a Friday in 2010 but by 2017 it has rolled through a full week (skipping Monday and Saturday thanks to leap years) and ends up on a Sunday. From a promotional aspect, you should think more about the day of the week a holiday falls than the date depending on the nature of the business.

Relative dates

The classic example of this is Easter. This ‘movable feast’ falls on the Sunday after the first full moon that falls on or after the northern hemisphere vernal (spring) equinox, or in practice on or after March 21. Another example of this is the regional anniversary dates. These are ‘Mondayised’ (or Fridayised) dates to be the day on or closest after the calendar date that the event takes place. This means all that each year the long weekend falls on a different date. If you are planning marketing for that holiday, you are best to treat them as long weekend events and double check the dates that they fall on each year.

Fixed date public holidays falling on weekends

There’s a whole raft of legislation on how to deal with this situation but the plan language version is found here . I won’t go into here as it’s far too complex to cover in a quick article but from a marketing perspective, if a public holiday falls on a weekend then a large number of people will have the next following weekday off as well. This means that you have a long week end to which build a marketing run on or to.  Christmas and New Year this year have a double effect with both the Monday and Tuesday becoming effective public holidays.  While the employment situation may change based on the employee (chech with your accountant or HR professional), the implcation for business and marketing is that it creates a long (or extra-long) weekend!

The Christmas close down

If you are old enough to remember when late night shopping on Thursday was a big thing, you’ll remember how New Zealand basically shut down for a very long time over the Christmas – New Year period. Even now with seven day a week retail, a lot of non business-to-customer companies will be closed for at least two weeks due to how Christmas and New Year holidays taking out two days out of each week. As such, if you want to hit the ground running in the new year with marketing material you need to have it printed and sitting with distribution companies before the Christmas close down. In fact you might want to have that in with the printing companies by the end of November as December is one the high workload time of years for us. As a side note while we at Copy Express will be closed down for Christmas and the first two weeks of January, if you have a big job let us know as we do check out emails on a regular basis and will start up the printers if we can justify the cost of coming into print your job especially.

Dealing with Easter

Officially only Good Friday and Easter Sunday are public holidays where most business are required by law to be closed, unless granted special dispensation by local authorities. Easter Monday is a public holiday but is more day where business can be open, like Boxing Day. From a marketing perspective, while you may have to be closed on the Friday and Sunday, you can pretty much treat the whole long weekend as one big promotional block, especially as this is the last holiday of ‘summer’ and the budget blowout for parents with kids at school has now been dealt with.

ANZAC Half day

This one can trip a lot of people up. Businesses are only legally required to be closed to noon on ANZAC day. This was to allow people to attend the dawn service and any after events and still be able get to work for the rest of the day. Most customer facing businesses (retail, customer service, hospitality, etc) will be open in the afternoon from 1pm, but anything else will be closed as it’s not worth the effort of being open. You will have noticed that a lot of big retailers have made the weekend closest to ANZAC a bit of a promotional block with week long deals that have one day specials happening on the half day. It will depend on the nature of your business if it’s worth trying to compete with that, but even if you are not it’s still smart to plan around what others are doing.

The unofficial holidays – School holidays

Like it or not, the school term system has a dramatic effect on people’s spending habits. Depending on the nature of your business, you will either see an upswing of business or a noticeable drop. This is why you should plan for it, either in targeted marketing to parents to offer a way to keep kids busy, or make specials that will draw customers in no matter how tight their budget is. You can find the information of when the holidays fall from here but every school has different  dates for the beginning of term one and the end of term four depending on student years they cater for.
Of course this is only just a small introduction to the matter of the public holiday. The best place to go to get more information on this is Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.