If you’ve seen one Hallmark movie, you’ve seen them all. Woman takes over struggling family business and after a high-powered businessman visits his family over Christmas in the same small, fictional New England town, the small business is saved with the help of the investor and the town (no, seriously, that is the plot of a Hallmark movie, Christmas Land). Hallmark seems to have landed in the middle of a Venn diagram between Christmas, romance, small town living and subpar acting which draws viewers in even though they have already watched 17 similar movies this month. But it got us thinking—how could demographics save these storylines? We break down a few of these movies and how their poor business mistakes could be fixed with a little data.

Check Inn to Christmas

A take on Romeo and Juliet, two feuding families who both own inns in small town Colorado band together to save both of their businesses at Christmastime after a new resort in a rival town gains in popularity. Several databases could have helped them improve their businesses before the situation became dire but knowing your quarterly potential through Non-Resident Population would help you determine if your inn was viable, and help you budget according to busy seasons. Retail Gap could also help them identify any potential shortcomings in the marketplace as far as restaurants or retail to better cater to their potential customers, including locals who would come to the inn’s restaurant for meals.

Christmas in Evergreen: Letters to Santa

This Hallmark movie sees Lisa going home for the holidays only to find that the local general store has closed permanently. Determined to see it restored back to its former glory, Lisa buys the store and brings it back to life. The movie is centered around a letter written to Santa 25 years ago, but that part of the plot isn’t important for our purposes. Lisa should be interested in Consumer Expenditure data for her trade area, as well as our line of Retail data to ensure that she is stocking the best merchandise possible to keep the store in business.

Christmas Cookies

When Hannah’s company buys a small, local cookie company, it puts the town’s future in jeopardy. What will they all do for work if the cookie factory closes? She works with the factory owner to keep the jobs in their hometown, and of course, they fall in love at Christmas. In the end, the deal doesn’t go through, and the town is saved, hooray! Of course, if the factory owner had good demographic data on his area, he could have found a new tenant. By showing that the town has low CrimeRisk scores, and a steady stream of potential employees, renting out the factory to another company should be simple.