The headquarters for Scotland's official independence campaign are designed with a very deliberate style: bold primary colours for the on-trend stools and chairs, over-sized light bulbs, polished blond wood and iPads resting on clean white counters. The message is hip, youthful and modern.

From these offices, on the lower ground floor of a Victorian sandstone building in central Glasgow, campaigners with Yes Scotland are preparing to unleash a torrent of billboard adverts, celebrity endorsements, star-studded campaign rallies, street stalls and pop-up shops selling independence for Scotland. For them, 2014 will be unlike any other year.

Blair Jenkins, the former BBC executive who leads Yes Scotland, a coalition of the Scottish National party, the Scottish Green party, and various socialists, environmentalists and unaligned pro-independence campaigners, is an enthusiastic man. And he will need to be. As the new year begins, Jenkins will be making the biggest pitch of his life: trying to persuade an as yet largely unconvinced, even sceptical, electorate to vote for independence this autumn.

While about 20% of Scotland's 4.2 million voters are yet to decide, the most recent opinion polls put the yes vote at 39% against 61% for no. Yet Jenkins is adamant he is making ground. "All the energy, all the ideas in this debate are coming from the pro-independence side.

"There's absolutely no doubt that more and more people who have a progressive view of what Scottish society can and should be, are asking which outcome next year is most likely to deliver the outcome? That's yes."

Yes Scotland claims that polling and anecdotal evidence tells it the no vote is softer than the polls suggest. However, the Scottish government's 670-page white paper on independence, touted by Alex Salmond as the definitive document, has only slightly lifted the yes vote in the polls since its publication on 25 November.

Jenkins glosses over the lack of impact, insisting the document was always meant to be a "slow burn." But his predictions earlier this year that the polls would tighten noticeably by Christmas have not been fulfilled.

In parallel to the independence campaign, there will be a series of events during 2014 that will colour and influence the debate, putting questions of Scotland's identity, history and culture at the forefront of public life.

There is the 700th anniversary in late June of Robert the Bruce's defeat of the English at the battle of Bannockburn in 1314, a totemic event for Scottish nationalists; Glasgow will host the 2014 Commonwealth games where a Scotland squad will take to the field, before the country's most exclusive resort, Gleneagles, stages the Ryder Cup golf tournament between Europe and the USA in late September.

From Hogmanay onwards, Scotland's arts festivals and tourist industry, championed by Alex Salmond's nationalist government, will host the second "year of Homecoming", a year-long mood-lifting marketing extravaganza involving hundreds of arts, culture and tourism events.

While those might underline the country's cultural energy and distinctiveness, the anti-independence campaign will push the UK's shared history with the 100th anniversary of the first world war.

Glasgow cathedral is hosting the UK's main service of remembrance on 4 August, the day after the Commonwealth games end. Commonwealth leaders are being invited to attend. Stirling, close to Bannockburn, is hosting UK armed forces day on the same weekend as the Bannockburn commemoration.

"There will be a different emotional energy around the debate in 2014," Jenkins says. "As we get closer to 18 September, the cultural and historical significance of the vote for the nation, of this generation deciding the future of the country; these things will become much more features of the campaign."

The polls suggest that the effect of these high-profile events might be overshadowed by economic issues.

With repeated warnings about Scotland's diminishing oil wealth and high spending echoing in their ears, about half of voters fear an independent Scotland would be worse off, against about a quarter who think it will be wealthier.

Jenkins and his colleagues admit too that another key question is likely to have an impact on the result: whether Labour can make a better, more convincing offer on Scotland's future than the SNP. Labour's counter-offer, promising more devolution to Scotland, is due to be published in March.

The success of Labour's pledges will hinge on Ed Miliband's performance in London: a realistic chance of a Tory victory at the 2015 UK general election is likely to add more percentage points to a yes vote. So too would a Ukip surge south of the border in the May European elections.

Yes Scotland's building, on the aptly named Hope Street, is only a few hundred metres from the Scottish Labour party headquarters, in turn a few hundred more from the offices of Better Together, the umbrella pro-UK campaign for Labour, the Tories and Lib Dems, discretely housed in what was once the Glasgow Arts Centre, a building boasting Charles Rennie Mackintosh-designed woodwork.

It is no coincidence that the offices are all neatly grouped together within walking distance in central Glasgow. It is likely that west central Scotland's largely urban vote will decide the result. And the main political battleground is not for committed nationalists – perhaps only a quarter of Scotland's voters fall into that camp - but the several million Scots who would prefer further devolution.

Still at least half a million votes short of victory, the SNP and Yes Scotland are concentrating their energies on prising votes from Labour's traditional heartlands and on women voters – who are generally more sceptical about independence than men. Urban, male working class voters are more likely to support independence, particularly the most disenfranchised and poorest. They are also least likely to vote.

Recent polls suggest that up to a fifth of Labour voters will vote yes. Jenkins claims that early this year, Yes Scotland will unveil more senior figures in Labour and the trade union movement as independence supporters.

The campaign has already had one coup, in the shape of Sir Charles Gray, the former Labour leader of Strathclyde Regional Council, now supporting independence. There is anecdotal evidence that Better Together's ties with the Tories – its most recent list of wealthy backers was dominated by landowners, merchant bankers and Tory donors – is alienating leftwing activists.

Labour's devolution commission paper in March will be expected to deliver on more tax and welfare powers to the Scottish parliament. Any perceived weakness on those topics will be exploited by its opponents. But for the first time since Salmond's crushing Scottish election victory in 2011, the polls are showing that Scottish Labour is moving much closer to the SNP in its overall popularity ratings. A recent poll by YouGov suggests Labour is nosing ahead on a combination of both the constituency and list votes for Holyrood.

Anas Sarwar, Scottish Labour's deputy leader and MP for Glasgow Central, agrees with Jenkins that party loyalties are largely discounted on single issues like independence.

But Sarwar maintains that Labour's strategy is to package its constitutional proposals within a bigger political programme: it wants to win back power at Holyrood in 2016 as well as the referendum. He disputes Yes Scotland's claim that Labour is haemorrhaging support, and says the challenge is to win people's trust.

"Fundamentally, the Labour party's job is to recognise that there are challenges in Scotland but to demonstrate what the real solutions are; those solutions aren't constitutional. It's genuine social and economic change.

"We have been clear we will have a constitutional, social and economic offer in advance of the referendum, which includes firm proposals coming out of the devolution commission."

The referendum vote "isn't the status quo versus a pretence of hope, milk and honey. This is a vote to stay in the UK by also voting to change Scotland within the UK."

He isn't relying on the polls either: "I'm never complacent about this. This is a referendum we can lose but it's also a referendum we must win. So I'll treat every single day between now and the referendum as a crucial moment for us, to make sure we get the right result for Scotland."

There is another factor that could help swing the result: the live, televised leaders' debates due in the summer. Salmond is an acknowledged master of the live debate and his likely opponent, Alistair Darling, the Better Together chairman and former Labour chancellor, is far more restrained.

Foreign diplomats in Scotland point to France's bruising presidential debate between Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande in 2012, and the surge in Nick Clegg's standing after the 2010 general election debates. This, says Jenkins, is an ace in the hand for Yes Scotland.

"It will get more intense; people will get more engaged, and the broadcast debates are going to be hugely important. And that will definitely suit the yes side of the argument."