Marketers will take almost any opportunity to draw attention to their brands. Holidays, rites of passage, celebrations of nearly every kind – we’re awash in The Season’s Best sales moments. Seems like there’s Never Been a Better Time to Buy practically every month.
Which brings us to this month. Both Pride and our newest federally-recognized holiday, Juneteenth, are celebrated in June. And true to form, brands are making headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Ready for Juneteenth? There’s Juneteenth Ice Cream from Walmart. Or there was – until a social media firestorm (rightfully) got it pulled from store shelves. Pride, for many brands, is largely limited to token rainbow logos and earnestly philosophical posts. All with July 4, the granddaddy of summer events, teasing its formidable red, white, and blue frenzy.
Can we – for a minute – just not? Sales goals are one thing. Making meaningful, relevant, long-term connections with an audience (particularly one that’s “new” for you) is quite another. Understand the differences and you can win at both.
A culture knows its own like no one else. Reaching anyone in it requires more than an adults-18-36-with-a-college-education lens. The subtleties of a shared story, based on background, history, and common experience, make it easy for a culture to know who (and what) is for real and who isn’t. Who will be invited in, even briefly, and who won’t. Who will be seen as an ally, and who won’t.
For marketers today, recognizing a cultural holiday appropriately – authentically – involves unlearning a lot of traditional marketing’s best practices, or rather tendencies. (One of many even larger unlearnings society is grappling with right now.) Taking the focus off of “what’s in it for us” to “check out what’s going on around us.”
For Juneteenth, instead of hyping a limited-time-special-edition-anything, it can look like a dedicated (and ongoing) effort supporting other businesses — Black-owned businesses, as local suppliers or partners and their missions — and magnifying what success can be for them. For Pride, can you interpret your brand’s mission in a way that allows you to participate with vs. sell to? Consider why the LGBTIQ community matters to you; share origin stories? Showcase triumphs? Challenge threats? There are many, many ways to show up with a relevant voice.
Transactions now require a greater investment behind their message; not just of strategy and metrics but of respect. Learning, understanding, really seeing with new eyes. So jump into it; do the same thing you’d do with any significant new project: tap subject matter experts. The people with lived-experience and knowledge you don’t get in books or blogs; let them lead you. Let them inform new processes, new definitions, whole new perspectives that challenge the “this is how we’ve always done it” mantra.
Therein lies the change your marketing needs. And it may be the most valuable kind of marketing there’s ever been.