Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

Why it works

A department store's Christmas sales push that became a national holiday ritual. On Thanksgiving morning 1924, Macy's staff marched a six-mile 'Christmas Parade' from Harlem to the newly enlarged Herald Square flagship, which Macy's billed as the 'World's Largest Store', with clowns, Mother Goose floats matching the store's Christmas windows, animals from the Central Park Zoo and Santa Claus, who was crowned on the store's marquee. About 10,000 people waited at the store; the next day's papers barely noticed, but Macy's promptly advertised that it would do it again. It is studied as the archetype of the brand-built institution: an event designed to open the shopping season that wove itself so deeply into the calendar that few viewers now think of it as marketing. Giant character balloons arrived in 1927 and television coverage in 1948. Gimbels in Philadelphia had staged a store parade first, in 1920; Macy's is the one that lasted a century.