Easter Retail Activations: Transforming Spaces in 2025

Easter represents more than just a happy holiday on the retail calendar, it's a significant opportunity for meaningful customer engagement and healthy sales. As someone who has developed countless seasonal retail activations over three decades, I've watched Easter strategies evolve, yet one constant remains: the combination of food, family, and festivity continues to drive substantial consumer spending.

In 2024 alone, Easter food spending reached an approximate 23.5% increase from the previous year. With today's consumers increasingly valuing experiences, retail spaces face both a challenge and an opportunity: that can increase dwell time and boost sales with the right strategy.

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This guide explores proven, creative approaches for Easter retail marketing and placemaking that can transform spaces into a must-visit destination during this popular trading period. Drawing from over 30 years of spatial activation experience, here are a couple of practical approaches that deliver results, even when working with limited budgets, often the reality in our industry.

Whether you're marketing a shopping centre retail precinct, or mixed-use development, these insights will help you navigate Easter's unique challenges while maximising community engagement and commercial outcomes.

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Contents‍

Easter’s Retail Significance

• Key Categories Driving Sales
  
• Insights from the Australian Retailers Association

The Foundation of Easter Activation Success

• Defining Clear Objectives
  
• Case Study: Tallawong Village
  
• Creating a Cohesive Experience Timeline
  
• Balancing Digital and Physical Engagement
  
• Strategic Incentives That Drive Results
  
• Building Community Through Participation
  

Creating Immersive Easter Experiences

• Multi-Sensory Activation Design
  
• Leveraging Visual Merchandising and Interaction
  

The Multi-Centre Strategy

• Case Study: Woolworths Property National Assets
  
• Strategic Campaign Scaling
  
• Digital-First Engagement and QR Code Integration
  
• High-Value Prize Mechanics
  
• Physical Touchpoints That Enhance Digital Impact
  

Conclusion

• Recap of Key Activation Takeaways
  
• How to Apply These Strategies for 2025 and Beyond
  

About the Author

• Julie Furlong – Founder of Design + Marketing

Easter’s Retail Significance

The holiday represents a unique retail opportunity where tradition, family gatherings, and seasonal shopping converge.

According to the Australian Retailers Association, Easter consistently ranks as the third most significant seasonal shopping period. What makes Easter particularly valuable is its broad impact across multiple retail categories:

• Food and Grocery: Beyond chocolate eggs and bunnies, Easter drives significant increases in premium food purchases for family gatherings and entertaining.
  
• Home and Décor: Consumers increasingly invest in home improvements and seasonal décor. Home improvement retailers note an uptick in traffic during the Easter period.
  
• Fashion and Accessories: With the seasonal transition and social gatherings, fashion retailers experience a 12-18% sales boost as shoppers refresh wardrobes.
  
• Gifts and Specialty Items: Gift purchasing expands to experiences, homewares, and personalised items, with specialty retailers seeing up to 30% increases.
  
  

Understanding these cross-category opportunities allows retail spaces to develop holistic activation strategies that benefit the entire tenancy mix rather than just seasonal specialty stores.

The Foundation of Easter Activation Success

A successful Easter Retail Easter promotion begins with clarity. Before jumping to creative execution, consider these fundamental strategic elements:

Define Clear Objectives

Your Easter activation should serve specific business goals while creating memorable experiences. The exemplary campaign for Tallawong Village demonstrated this strategic approach with clearly defined objectives:

• Maximise economies of scale with the dates so close for 2025, leveraging a visually impactful activation made sense, from 12 April–11 May. Seamlessly transitions between two key seasonal shopping centre activations; Easter and Mother's Day.
• Reinforce Tallawong Village as a vibrant, family-focused shopping destination during the Easter season.
• Drive increased shopper spend and enhance customer loyalty by offering an exclusive Mother's Day gift.
• Enhance foot traffic by offering incentives and engaging seasonal activities for families.
• Increase digital engagement by encouraging social media participation and new followers.
• Strengthen community connections through rewarding experiences.

This multi-objective approach ensures that the activation delivers across both commercial and community metrics, a balanced strategy that modern retail spaces require.

Create a Cohesive Experience Timeline

With some thought and strategic planning, the Tallawong Village activation established a comprehensive promotional timeline from the Easter Promotional Period: 30 March – 13 April to the Mother's Day Promotional Mechanics: Seamlessly continuing the customer journey.

This timeline approach maintains engagement throughout the critical April-May retail period, maximising return on a single installation investment.

Balance Digital and Physical Engagement

Modern retail shopping centre activations must bridge the physical and digital realms. The Tallawong Village example incorporated:

• Physical Engagement Elements:
  Easter Bunny visits and photo opportunities (12 & 19 April)
  
  • Craft activities and storytelling sessions
  • Custom themed in-centre visual merchandising activation
  • Exclusive gift redemption at a beautifully designed floral-themed station
• Digital Components:
  Social media entry mechanics for giveaways
  
  • Digital promotion and Meta placement
  • Community building through follower acquisition

This integration ensures the activation reaches customers before, during, and after their physical visit, extending the impact and measurability of your campaign.

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Create Compelling Incentives

Strategic incentives drive both foot traffic and social engagement. Consider how the Tallawong campaign offered tiered incentives:

• Immediate Value: Interactive experiences like Easter Bunny visits, craft sessions and storytelling
• Exclusive Offers: Limited edition gold-plated bracelets for Mother's Day (first 50 customers each day)
• Premium Giveaways: $100 pamper vouchers and Royal Easter Show family passes

These varied incentives appeal to different customer motivations, from experience seekers to value hunters, ensuring broad appeal across demographic segments.

Build Community Through Participation

Perhaps most importantly, a successful Easter activation builds lasting community connections. By requiring social media following and engagement to participate, the Tallawong campaign didn't just create a temporary promotion but built a persistent community channel.

This community-building approach transforms a seasonal retail campaign/activation into a long-term retail asset, allowing for continued engagement long after the Easter decorations are stored away.

Creating Immersive Easter Experiences

With strategy firmly established, focus on crafting experiences that transform the retail space into a destination worth visiting. Today's consumers seek more than transactions, they want memorable experiences that justify choosing physical retail over online convenience.

Multi-Sensory Activation Design

The Tallawong Village activation exemplifies how a well-designed central installation can serve multiple purposes. Their approach included:

• Visual Impact: A striking, Instagram-worthy seating installation that transitioned from Easter to Mother's Day theming
• Interactive Elements: Designated photo opportunity spaces that encouraged user-generated content
• Functional Design: Doubled as a space for entertainment and giveaways, with functional design and comfortable seating that encouraged longer dwell time within the centre.

Multi-Centre Approach

The "Score a Sweet Win" Easter promotion from Woolworths National Assets showcases another effective approach, particularly for property groups managing multiple retail destinations. This campaign demonstrates how economies of scale can be leveraged across multiple centres while maintaining local relevance.

Strategic Multi-Centre Implementation

The Woolworths Assets campaign effectively distributed a standardised Retail Easter promotion across multiple shopping centres with varying budget allocations for:

• Lakeside Shopping Centre
• Niddrie Central
• Kiama Village
• Gordonvale Shopping Centre

This tiered investment approach allowed each centre to participate in a cohesive campaign while scaling implementation according to centre size and performance expectations. The standardised creative assets and mechanics enabled significant cost efficiencies compared to creating unique campaigns for each location.

Digital-First Engagement Strategy

Unlike the Tallawong Village approach, which balanced physical and digital elements equally, the Woolworths Assets campaign prioritised digital engagement:

• Social Media Competition: Participants entered by commenting on designated posts
• Follower Growth Focus: Entry required following the relevant centre's social media pages
• QR Code Integration: Physical tall boards featured QR codes for easy digital engagement
• Meta Boost: Paid social amplification to extend organic reach

This digital-first approach created a compelling data capture opportunity while building persistent social community assets for each centre.

High-Value Prize Strategy

The campaign centered around a premium prize offer; 1kg Lindt chocolate hampers, providing:

• Aspirational Appeal: Lindt's premium positioning aligned with quality retail destinations
• Seasonal Relevance: Chocolate hampers perfectly matched Easter gift-giving themes
• Visual Impact: The distinctive Lindt gold bunny provided immediate brand recognition
• Perceived Value: The substantial size (1kg) emphasised the prize's generosity

Complementary Physical Activation‍

While digital engagement drove the core mechanics, the campaign complemented this with Easter Bunny visits across the promotional period (7-20 April). This physical presence:

• Created shareable photo moments to fuel user-generated content
• Provided a tangible reason for families to visit the centres
• Reinforced the digital campaign's messaging in the physical environment
• Generated additional retail foot traffic traffic even from non-participants

The combination of digital competition and physical character experiences created multiple engagement pathways for different customer segments.

To sum up

This insight "Easter Retail Activations: Transforming Spaces in 2025" provides a comprehensive guide for retail space managers looking to maximise the commercial and community-building opportunities of Easter. It establishes Easter's significance on the retail calendar with concrete statistics and offers strategic approaches to activation planning.

The content is structured around two contrasting but complementary Australian case studies: Tallawong Village's dual-season physical installation approach and Woolworths Property National Assets' multi-centre digital-first strategy. Both demonstrate different paths to achieving similar objectives of increased retail foot traffic, tenant sales, and community Easter shopper engagement.

The guide provides practical insights on budget optimisation, cross-tenant collaboration, and measurement frameworks that go beyond sales metrics. The inclusion of a detailed planning timeline makes the content immediately actionable for readers.

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Julie Furlong is the founder of Design + Marketing (D+M), an award-winning Sydney-based agency specialising in branding, property-marketing and end-to-end solutions. With over 30 years of experience working with leading companies across Australia, Julie combines strategic thinking with creative excellence to deliver marketing solutions that drive measurable results, creating vibrant experiences and innovation. Connect with Julie on LinkedIn Julie Furlong is the founder of Design + Marketing (D+M), an award-winning Sydney-based agency specialising in branding, property-marketing and end-to-end solutions. With over 30 years of experience working with leading companies across Australia, Julie combines strategic thinking with creative excellence to deliver marketing solutions that drive measurable results, creating vibrant experiences and innovation. Connect with Julie on LinkedIn or visit Design + Marketing.