Your summer challenge is to keep engagement up while your audience is at the beach or switched off. Your marketing strategy needs to adapt to every season. Today is the perfect day to talk about more visual, lighter campaigns optimised for mobile.
In summer, don’t sell directly. The most effective marketing campaigns are the ones that focus on entertainment. Connect through humour, nostalgia and a refreshing lifestyle in the hottest months of the year.
It’s time to adapt to a runaway consumer who’s finally muted their phone notifications and temporarily archived their work groups. It’s time to speak to a consumer who’s thinking only about holidays, clearing their head and switching off. It’s time to win them over and make them see themselves in short, light-hearted, relatable reels.
Why are brands like Estrella Damm and La Casera the ultimate summer brands? Companies specialising in experiential marketing always surprise us with their summer campaigns. Both have a very clear brand identity and a lot to do with how summer is understood in Spain. Successful campaigns focused on connecting with consumers by appealing both to the summer of our lives and to the idea that in Spain, things are done properly or not at all, even when it comes to a pre-lunch drink.
Another benchmark brand for summer campaigns is IKEA. The company knows its audience very well, and knows that most people don’t own a dream house in Mallorca next to crystal-clear beaches. In this context, celebrating those little terraces in an ordinary flat in any sweltering city is a gesture consumers love.
IKEA gets top marks for showing typical summer dramas with humour, making our thumbs stop, quit scrolling and dive right into the story, with all its consequences.
The key is how IKEA solves real problems, like not having a garden or enough space to enjoy summer outdoors. Instead of disguising or ignoring everyday reality, squeezing a little table and two chairs onto a tight balcony, it proudly celebrates it.
All these summer marketing benchmark brands use social media and short formats. A foolproof way to win people over, trailer-style, with fast, dynamic content designed for mobile, and then direct digital users to the website, where they’ll find the full stories and product activations.
For your brand to weather the summer onslaught and compete with dignity against the idleness of the season, dive into refreshing stories that connect with your ideal customer from the very first frame. Appeal to emotion, to a slower pace and to the beauty of leaving your worries behind.
Remember: in summer, your brand doesn’t go on holiday!
