We’re used to seeing U.S. consumers spend big bucks during the end-of-year holidays, the most part cashed in by the retail industry.

At the same time, advertisers always go above and beyond to secure revenue for their respective companies or clients, which might prove more challenging to do this year as the entire world navigates a period of financial uncertainty.

This is why now more than ever, it’s important to predict consumer behavior and not go blindly into building advertising strategies for the festive season.

To make things easier for businesses, Creatopy ran a survey on holiday shopping that over 1,100 U.S. consumers took the time to fill in.

The questions covered topics such as how will this year’s holiday shopping budget compare to that of last year, whether shopping will be done online or in-store, and which are the most desirable product categories for consumers on Thanksgiving weekend (Black Friday and Cyber Monday included) or Christmas, to name a few.

Here are the key findings of the survey-based study that followed:

• Consumers will begin shopping earlier than ever this year, about two to three months before the holidays, to be more specific. They also seek value, so they will start monitoring prices and searching for deals at roughly the same time.

• Inflation might not affect holiday spending to a great degree, as consumers don’t display a high level of concern on the matter right now. Still, this could change depending on the evolution of the economic situation.

• Word of mouth is the number one purchase driver, followed closely by online ads. This is a signal for companies to put more thought into customer experiences and invest in pay-per-click advertising campaigns for the festive months.

As we mentioned, these are just the highlights, but you can download Creatopy’s study for a complete forecast of the upcoming holiday shopping season.