If I were admitting this in a therapy session, I would 100% trace it back to being my mother’s fault - she’s a window dresser, and my childhoods were spent with very elaborate and meticulously colour matched festive displays, never a hint of tinsel or paper chains. In mum’s house, if your wrapping paper doesn’t match the colour scheme for the year, your gifts aren’t allowed around the tree… 

Now as a grown-up tree owner with my very own baubles, I would love to say I take a more relaxed attitude to tree decorating. Surprise, surprise - I really don’t.

My decs match my decor, and my tree is what you may call ‘curated’. I can sit and look at it for days before I catapult myself off the sofa mid-10-o’clock-news because I’ve worked out which errant decoration is ruining the flow.

But one thing still grinds my gears more than anything else. Why oh why do you have to skip through eight settings on the poxy lights (whilst doing gymnastics to get to the chuffing plug) to get to static warm white? And even more annoyingly, why can my family not grasp that this is the setting we need it on? 

Surely manufacturers realise that the majority of people aren’t going to want a chaotic flashing horror show in the corner of their living room? Why do they put the insane flashing setting first? Is that setting really the one that’s used most?!?

Now, in the season of goodwill, I don’t want to tie my tree trauma tenuously back to marketing, but there’s a lesson here. People tend to know what they want, and want to take the simplest route to get it. Making sure your platform - be it a website, shopfront (physical or digital) or however you interact - makes life as simple as possible for them to get to your product means they’re going to be far happier, and likely to engage with your business. 

A fancy marketing strategy is all well and good but if your user experience is crap, it all goes to pot because nobody will hang around long enough to experience it.

Now, please excuse me, I’m off to yoga-bend myself round the back of the sofa to press the lights right times to turn the bloody tree on. Merry Christmas!