A gender-neutral Santa with tattoos? Survey gauges how to rebrand St. Nick

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Nothing to do with books, but a great many people in the book business are having nothing to do with books this week.

From CBS News:

Should jolly old Saint Nicholas become jolly old Saint Nicola? Should Santa be gender neutral? More than a quarter of people who responded to a new online survey by GraphicSprings say yes.

And that’s not all. When asked how they would modernize Santa, twenty percent of people responded that he should have tattoos. Eighteen percent responded that his iconic red-and-white suit should be replaced with skinny jeans. And twenty two percent said that Santa should ditch the sleigh in exchange for a flying car.

. . . .

And forget cookies. Twenty one percent of people who responded to GraphicSprings’ survey suggested that Santa should go on a diet – though it’s hard to imagine leaving a crudités platter out in the living room the night before Christmas.

The graphic design company used Google surveys to collect responses from 400 people across the U.S. and U.K. on how they would rebrand Santa with a more modern edge.

Link to the rest at CBS News

19 thoughts on “A gender-neutral Santa with tattoos? Survey gauges how to rebrand St. Nick”

  1. The sample size is tiny and I assume, like most online surveys, is self selected though there was presumably some kind of target audience. So the suggestions they came up with are pretty well worthless, at least if they were intended to be representative of anyone other than people who complete on line surveys.

    I’m still feeling grumpy.

    Still some of the suggestions (who decided which ones though?) were then voted on by a group of 4,000, but as nothing is said about how this group were selected we still have no way of knowing if the results are representative of the general population.

    It was though interesting to read that a station playing Baby It’s Cold Outside in the Bay Area produced a swift and intense backlash. I realise that a section of the population has raised the ability to be offended to an art form, and it was California, but I really want to play Flanders and Swann’s Have Some Madeira M’Dear to them just to see what happens.

    • I understand Chicago also had a station Ban ‘Baby’ this year that made the press (Here in California I heard about this last year)

  2. 400 people do not a good survey make. Plus the problem with their suggestions is that they want to rebrand Santa to match a narrow niche at a moment in time. Santa needs to be timeless. In 20 years when people point and laugh at skinny jeans the Santa in them will be considered ridiculous.

    • And since that skinny guy won’t be interested in all those cookies and milk the kids will need a new offering.

      Hmm, I wonder how wired he’d be if they each gave him a Starbucks espresso? 😉

      MYMV and your Santa be cheery.

      • And he’s not amused by it.

        He eats healthy, exercises regularly, and does a mean Elvis.
        If anything, he looks more like Kurt Russell than the fat dude.

  3. Really PG. There is clickbait, and then there is shameless clickbait, which is what this is.

    Santa Claus is a fictional character in the public domain. Nobody controls that image. People can imagine him however they want, and are under no obligation to pay any attention to however someone else might want to imagine him.

    Like they have in Fortnite: https://gamewith.net/fortnite/article/show/2094

    • You’re correct on the intellectual property issues, DM, but, as I mentioned, everybody in the publishing business and the media that write about the publishing business is out of the office right now (along with a lot of IP attorneys), so I’m dealing with the scraps here.

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