The holidays, which never lack for retail melodrama, have acquired a peculiarly theatrical cast this year, as two of the largest big-box chains unveil campaigns that lean less on screaming about price and more on, of all things, narrative coherence.

Walmart, which has spent the last eighteen months trying to persuade shoppers that it is not quite the Walmart they remember, has enlisted the Muppets and the actor Walton Goggins for "A Who Knew Carol," a holiday riff on the Dickens adaptation that positions Miss Piggy as an arbiter of fashion. The effort is an extension of the retailer's broader "Who Knew?" platform, which has been aimed at higher-income consumers who might otherwise cross the parking lot to Target.

Target, for its part, is placing its seasonal bets on a fictional institution called the Holiday Academy of Giftology, where the actress D'Arcy Carden plays a faculty member dispensing advice on what to buy for people who insist they don't want anything. (A common enough problem, though one suspects the academy's graduation rate is modest.)

The two campaigns share a certain structural DNA — colorful characters, invented settings, an emphasis on storytelling over doorbuster circulars — which represents a departure from the fragmented, Black-Friday-centric approach both chains have favored in recent years. "Rather than shouting price, they're shouting that storyline of, trust us, we have the best gifts," said Taylre Stumpf, a retail consultant at Kantar.

For Target, the stakes extend beyond a single quarter. The chain has been working to recapture what shoppers once called the "Tar-zhay" mystique, a cheap-but-chic positioning that frayed during the post-pandemic years amid culture-wars turbulence and stores that looked, as one analyst put it, tired. A new chief executive has helped steady the ship, but the holidays will indicate whether the course correction has truly taken.

Walmart, meanwhile, has been steadily encroaching on Target's traditional territory, winning over more affluent shoppers while growing revenue at a pace that makes its smaller rival's gains look incremental. The retailer has more than 4,600 domestic stores to Target's fewer than half that.

"Walmart has definitely been giving Target a run for their money," Ms. Stumpf said.

Target's remaining advantages, she suggested, lie in personalization and the sort of curatorial instincts that resonate with a certain millennial sensibility — the shopper who wants to feel discovered rather than merely served. Whether an imaginary academy can convey that distinction remains to be seen, though the Muppets have been known to upstage almost anyone.

Original story published in Marketing Dive: "Target vs. Walmart: Holiday marketing's stakes feel higher this year"