Many retailers and producers depend heavily on holiday shopping to hit their annual goals.  The challenge is often trying to differentiate your wares and offerings from the multitude of other vendors trying to do the same thing.  This Forbes article, Five Psychological Principles to Guide Your Holiday Marketing Campaign, discusses psychological influences and how marketers can tailor their marketing campaigns to capitalize on consumer buying behavior.  The five principles they discuss are:

1. Urgency and scarcity
2. Social proof
3. The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon
4. Paradox of choice and compound value
5. Anchoring and Decoy pricing

Many of these concepts are discussed in Essentials of Marketing in Chapter 5, Final Consumers and Their Buying Behavior.  Ask your students to provide examples of producers/retailers that have utilized some of these techniques recently!