ROSEVILLE, Calif. — The glowing winter wonderland inside the mall here, adorned with fake snow and pulsing with electronic music, beckons weary holiday shoppers. But there’s no Santa, and no elves; instead, tablets and laptops are the lure of Google’s high-tech holiday display.

Google and other leading tech giants – Amazon, SAP AG, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft – are opening retail pop-up stores, stores-within-stores, mall kiosks and showrooms, even outfitting tour buses with their latest gadgets, to ramp up sales during the crucial holiday shopping season. Inspired and challenged by Apple’s successful retail stores, the companies hope to convert tech-skeptical consumers into gadget buyers by letting them swipe, type and tinker with the new technology, experts say.

Not every sale, these companies are learning, can be made online.

“They have to be where the public goes and frequents, and that’s the mall,” said David Johnson, chief executive officer of Strategic Vision, a Georgia-based branding firm. “Your tech geeks are going to order online. But before you’re going to see mass consumption, people are going to want to touch the products.”

As more big tech companies add consumer gadgets to their product lineup and compete with Apple, which has an ever-growing footprint of flourishing stores, they’ll also add more pop-up displays to show off those gadgets, allowing consumers to interact with tech in a personal way, experts say.

“Everyone in retail has looked at Apple in the last few years to try and replicate what they’ve done,” said Stephen Baker, an analyst with The NPD Group. “If you are dabbling in hardware you have to be in front of the customer.”

HP and SAP, the German software giant, have each taken retail displays on the road – HP is running a truckload of gadgets and demos across the country. SAP built a bus to showcase its cloud services, mobile technology and data applications. It has since parked the bus at 61 events, including the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco and a football tailgate party in Detroit.

“It kind of looks like an Apple store,” said Byron Banks, vice president of product marketing at in California. “It has iPads on it. It has touch screens on it.”

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