Seasonal Marketing Done Right: How to Go Beyond the Clichés

Introduction

Seasonal marketing is one of the most powerful tools for CPG food and beverage brands. Consumers are naturally primed to make purchases around holidays, seasonal shifts, and cultural moments–like stocking up on limited-edition flavors or buying festive snacks for holidays. Brands that strategically tap into these seasonal themes improve sales, develop stronger brand loyalty, and increase customer engagement. However, seasonal marketing can feel repetitive and predictable when executed poorly.

Seasonal marketing isn’t just about relevance–it’s about driving sales and customer retention in the moments with high competition. One study conducted by Amazon researchers found that when products with seasonal relevancy are presented, there are statistically higher purchases. Paired with veteran industry knowledge that well-executed campaigns generate long-term brand goodwill, it’s evident that seasonal marketing doesn’t just create a short-term sales spike. It creates a lasting connection that keeps consumers purchasing throughout the year.

So how do you break through the noise and create unique, distinctive marketing strategies? This article will help CPG food and beverage brands develop strategies for seasonal content that feels innovative and aligned with their identity, while still tapping into seasonal purchasing power that results in boosted sales year-round and long-term customer engagement.

Best Practice #1: Avoid Cliches

Common Cliche Pitfalls

It’s common to see brands lean on predictable imagery: sparkling blue pools for summer, crisp orange leaves for fall, or extravagant parties for the new year. These elements are familiar and easily recognizable, making them the effortless pick when creating a theme for the season. However, because these themes are seen across many brands year after year, it’s easy for consumers to ignore them and for you to disappear among the festive noise.

In addition to imagery, be aware of the language your brand uses in campaigns. Much like visuals, specific phrases can be ignored by consumers when seen repeatedly during the season. Cliches like, “Tis the season to give…” or, “Beat the heat with…” will have a hard time resonating with buyers as they wade through the plethora of ads.

How to Avoid Cliches Properly

Instead of recycling the same aspects seen every year, evolve seasonal themes while maintaining familiarity. You want the connection to the theme to be identifiable while still sparking interest with an original take on the concept. Consumers should still be able to understand the theme if presented with the campaign outside of the season, ensuring your brand isn’t straying into creativity that borders on unrecognizable.

Pick a single item–a color palette or a nature-related feature, for example–as your guiding pillar and build out from there. Consider how less popular elements naturally align with the aspect you choose. Innovating around one recognizable feature keeps the campaign relevant to the season while allowing for a creative slant.

Examples of Avoiding Cliches

Starbucks has long been associated with seasonal cheer, especially during the winter holidays. Rather than using the same seasonal cup designs every year, the brand reinvents the concept. There have even been years that customers have created the designs that adorn the cup. The new styles keep consumers engaged and excited to see what’s new while staying tied to the familiar and expected holiday offering.

Image from Starbucks

Strategies and Ideas for Avoiding Cliches

To keep seasonal campaigns fresh, audit past seasonal campaigns and identify patterns. What themes or visuals do you tend to repeat? What garnered high engagement? Instead of discarding successful elements, pick one or two and brainstorm ways to refresh them, like with a new interactive component or an unexpected partnership.

For smaller brands, a redesigned product every year may not be feasible. Instead, focus on leveraging User-Generated Content (UGC) for seasonal engagement. Pick one specific product or season-specific visual and run a social media challenge encouraging customers to share their use of the product with that theme. This will tie the UGC together with a common thread and still provide unique content.

For example, a granola brand can develop a contest asking fans to use a newly-released flavor to create seasonal shapes on their favorite meals and snacks. By sharing some basic examples, like a snowflake on top of yogurt or a present on a cheese board, you give consumers a place to start that lets their creativity soar.

Best Practice #2: Ensure Brand Alignment

Seasonal Brand Alignment Pitfalls

Not every brand needs to participate in every season or holiday. Campaigns should feel like a natural extension of your brand, not a forced attempt to participate in a trend. Seasonal marketing should reinforce a brand’s existing values and personality rather than a temporary, out-of-character rebrand. If the campaign isn’t something that would make sense for your brand if it weren’t seasonal, it’s likely a forced seasonal push instead of a strategic move.

It’s easy for brands to get caught up in seasonal excitement and create content that, while festive, doesn’t align with long-term messaging. An attempt that feels like a major departure from the norm can alienate an audience, especially one that was built on genuine connection and shared values.

How to Do Seasonal Brand Alignment Right

Ensure that you have a clear understanding of your audience’s perception of your brand. What you portray and what your consumers perceive can be different, so make sure you are speaking to what your fans believe about your brand. If it’s taking a lot of effort to figure out how your brand aligns with a theme, it may be best to sit that one out.

Brands with an edgy personality can flip traditional seasonal themes to better fit, like an Anti-Valentine’s Day campaign that embraces a tongue-in-cheek approach. Staying true to a tone while still leveraging the holiday will allow you to connect with your existing consumer base while also sparking interest in new fans.

Examples of Seasonal Brand Alignment

Olipop loves to take a health-conscious spin on nostalgic flavors. Root beer, cream soda, grape, and orange are all classic flavors that are staples in Olipop’s portfolio. When Barbie celebrated its 65th anniversary, the healthy soda brand partnered with the doll maker to celebrate the milestone. With such a dynamic toy to pull inspiration from, the possibilities were endless. Olipop stayed true to their sentimentality and debuted a limited-time peaches and cream flavor as an homage to a Peaches & Cream Barbie doll. The flavor was so aligned with their brand identity and such a hit with consumers, it returned to shelves permanently the following year.

Images from drinkolipop.com and Food & Wine

Strategies and Ideas for Seasonal Brand Alignment

To prevent an inauthentic take on a theme, brands should run seasonal campaign concepts through an internal brand alignment check. Gather a focus group of internal brand champions, team members who deeply understand your company’s values, to preview the campaign and provide feedback. Ask questions like, “Does this campaign feel like “us?” Would you recognize the brand even without a logo?” If the seasonal message overshadows the brand, consider refining the approach.

For example, a spice company with a tongue-in-cheek approach to marketing campaigns can thrive during the Valentine’s Day season. Create a “heat meter” graphic showing different spice blends with playful messages, like, “Mild Crush” or “Fiery Passion” to show the various heat levels. Go a step further and create a compatibility chart that matches different spices to relationship types, like Smokey & Mysterious vs. Sweet & Spicy.

Best Practice #3: Be Innovative

Seasonal Innovation Pitfalls

Sometimes, a brand finds immediate success with a seasonal campaign. They find the perfect balance of leveraging recognizable imagery, staying true to their brand voice, and evoking emotional connection that makes a campaign a hit with customers. With sales reflecting the accomplishment, it’s tempting to take this success and make minor tweaks without changing anything new. 

While consistency can be valuable, seasonal campaigns that are repetitive year after year will lose impact over time. Consumers love tradition, but repeating the same campaign without evolution can make it feel outdated. At its worst, fans may believe that if you’re not willing to put in the effort for new campaign material, your products’ quality suffer the same fate.

How to Do Seasonal Innovation Right

The most effective way to approach seasonal campaigns is to keep what works while introducing new elements to maintain excitement. Instead of overhauling a campaign completely, brands should identify the core elements that make their seasonal marketing recognizable and beloved, then refresh the execution to reflect changing consumer behavior. Update visuals, incorporate interactive elements, or integrating emerging digital trends can help brands modernize seasonal content without losing nostalgia.

The most innovative seasonal campaigns don’t just reflect the holidays, they tap into cultural and seasonal trends, making them feel both timely and ahead of the curve. This can include marketing trends, like a popular content format, or food and beverage trends, like an in-demand flavor or ingredient.

Remember, quick action is crucial here–seasonal content should be released early in the season so your brand is viewed as an innovator rather than a late adopter. If a seasonal trend is gaining traction in October, launching content in December means you’ve already missed the momentum. Brands that execute early gain the advantage of being first to market, generating excitement before customers are bombarded with similar messaging from competitors. 

Examples of Seasonal Innovation

Hershey’s Kisses Holiday Bells commercial perfected this innovative approach. The classic holiday ad featured Kisses “ringing” like bells to a familiar song. The ad had been a staple for over 30 years with only minor updates to include CGI. In 2020, the commercial was updated to include an entirely new scene. While the Kisses still produced a nostalgic tune, the end was changed to include a father and daughter baking holiday treats. 

While the commercial was met with mixed reviews, what can’t be denied is the innovative approach to a commercial that found great success initially.

Strategies and Ideas for Seasonal Innovation

Monitor industry trends reports (like this one from Julee Ho Media) to identify what’s gaining momentum. Brands that integrate up-and-coming elements into their seasonal marketing position themselves as trendsetters instead of followers.

Identify what aspects of successful campaigns resonate the most with your audience. Review audience sentiment by analyzing social media comments to determine what produces the most positive feedback. Once identified, keep that detail and innovate around it. 

For example, a small candy company is in a great position to embrace innovation in a couple of different ways. If preparing for a spring product launch, review a trend report and identify any emerging flavors or visuals that can be leveraged. Some experts are predicting a resurgence in floral flavors and visuals. Take advantage of this trend early in the year by making a new product with a hint of rose or edible rose in the presentation.

Additionally, this brand can review last year’s seasonal sales and see what was trending. If shareable sizes were on the upswing during the fall, there’s a good chance that the product was brought to gatherings for all to enjoy. Use that information to develop campaign visuals that emphasize your product as a sharing staple, like displaying a Thanksgiving meal with all sides replaced by serving dishes full of candy.

Best Practice #4: Create an Emotional Connection

Emotional Connection Pitfalls

Seasonal moments and holidays naturally evoke emotion. Relying solely on the spirit of the season, rather than making a deeper connection with your audience, can lead to forgettable campaigns. Winter holidays bring feelings of togetherness and summer drives a sense of adventure, but without building emotional storytelling around your brand, your product can disappear in the sea of other campaigns trying to capitalize on the exact same seasonal feeling.

How to Create an Emotional Connection

The key is to build the emotional story so it is directly tied to your brand. While you can and should leverage the emotions inherently linked to the holiday, you’ll also want to help consumers feel something meaningful about your brand specifically.

A seasonal campaign isn’t about decorations, colors, or festive imagery–it’s about creating an emotional connection with consumers. Audiences don’t engage with ads because they look seasonal, they engage because something feels meaningful. Instead of relying on generic seasonal cheer, brands should focus on real stories, nostalgia, and shared experiences that create a lasting impact. Tapping into a universal emotion, like joy or gratitude, will resonate for customers far beyond the holiday.

Examples of Emotional Connection

Coca-Cola has been creating emotional connections for decades, with one of the first examples being their “Hey Kid, Catch!” commercial that aired during the 1980 Super Bowl. The ad quickly captures a near-universal feeling among sports fans of having a favorite player and being starstruck by them. The kid’s selfless sharing and Joe Greene’s delayed reciprocation tapped into a sense of nostalgia and connected a sense of giving with Coca-Cola’s brand. Customers do not remember the commercials because they feel festive–they remember them because of how the brand makes them feel.

Image from Sports Illustrated

Strategies and Ideas for Implementing an Emotional Connection

Start leveraging narrative marketing in your campaigns. A storytelling framework lets you forge emotional connections and foster trust by sharing a genuine story that portrays vulnerability and empathy. Begin by learning about the major points in a storytelling framework and how your individual story can fit into those. See a step-by-step guide and examples at our Guide to CPG Narrative Marketing.

For example, a startup coffee company is naturally set up to participate in narrative marketing. First, find the story. Where are the beans grown? Who are the farmers? Where are the beans processed? Why was it important to start a coffee company? What sets you apart from a landscape of coffee conglomerates? How do employees contribute to success? Once you identify the story worth telling (don’t worry–every brand has one), identify how to leverage it organically. Perhaps this brand is really committed to sustainability practices. Pairing a sustainability story with a holiday like Earth Day is a genuine way to build an emotional connection.

Conclusion

Seasonal marketing isn’t about just showing up–it’s about creating something that resonates. It’s the thoughtfulness behind the execution that determines whether the campaign stands out or blends into the rest of the season. Balance tradition with innovation, leverage emerging trends, and stay true to your brand to build seasonal campaigns that make lasting impacts.

Whether you’re launching a new product, creating a limited-time experience, or telling a compelling story, the key is to make your campaign relevant, fresh, and deeply connected to your audience. You don’t want to jump on seasonal trends. You want to define them.

Here are some of our favorite examples of brands that really got their seasonal campaigns right:

Chobani has built a brand around being a food maker on a mission to create delicious food while elevating communities and making the world heather. They capitalized on year-end review posts with an emphasis on storytelling. By sharing statistics of the impact they made and behind-the-scenes photos of staff, they blended authentic storytelling with traditional themes.

Omsom has a strong visual brand with bold colors that reflects the intensity and warmth of their products. They kept that styling in a holiday post, including classic holiday aspects like bows and ornaments in their own unique color palette.

Halo Top keeps a clean approach to their content, a theme that is also seen in their seasonal posts. A neat, minimalistic background and tablescape remain the defining aesthetic in this Thanksgiving post. While there are recognizable items in the scene, like the pumpkin pie, the mauve background brings a creative twist that ties into their Blueberry Crumble flavor.

Olipop’s retro style is identifiable in both product launches and seasonal campaigns. By taking some favorite old-school holiday features–a crushed velvet rug, vintage tv, and shiny icicle tinsel on the tree–they keep authenticity front and center with this classic visual.

Oreo is known for being a fun and whimsical brand, often sharing posts of fake flavors or delicious recipes that highlight the delicious cookie. The brand brought the silliness with a post during the April 2024 solar eclipse. While looking at the sun, they used a cookie to block out the shining dot, effectively creating their own eclipse. While the eclipse was a large bandwagon to jump on, they found a way to leverage the hot topic in a way that was unique to their brand voice.

Ready to elevate your seasonal marketing?

Download our Seasonal Campaign Checklist to ensure your next holiday campaign is strategic, impactful, and aligned with your brand.

Julee Ho Media is a boutique photography company specializing in CPG, food and beverage brands. Click here to get a quote and discover how we can help elevate your brand.

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