strategy·Published 2026-03
Corporate Holiday Card Visual Complexity and Subsequent Workforce Reduction Announcements: A Positive Association
Principal investigator: Dr. Percival Ashcombe, Chief Research Officer.
Companies that send more visually complex holiday cards in a given year are more likely to announce a significant workforce reduction in the following six months.
Methodology
Three hundred and forty corporate holiday cards were collected from a solicitation distributed to Institute subscribers, professional network contacts, and, for twenty-one entries, directly retrieved from social media posts in which companies shared their own cards. Visual complexity was scored by a panel of three Institute raters on a ten-point scale using the Institute's Holiday Communication Complexity Rubric (HCCR), which evaluates foil usage, element count, message word count, and the presence of a custom illustration. Workforce reduction announcements in the following six months were identified from press coverage and SEC filings.
Funding disclosure: Funded by the Institute's Communications Research Reserve. The study's publication was timed to coincide with the holiday card season, a decision the Institute describes as 'methodologically neutral.'
Instruments cited in this study
Full citation
Ashcombe, P. (2026). Corporate Holiday Card Visual Complexity and Subsequent Workforce Reduction Announcements: A Positive Association. Institute for the Study of Pointless Metrics. r = 0.82, p < 0.001, n = 340.