Here at AQ Bottled Water, when we’re not putting together the latest water bottle label design, we like to keep an eye on interesting marketing and branding techniques across the industry.
This week, we’re thinking of Autumn products and their marketing. The most obvious one which springs (or perhaps falls) to mind these days is, of course, the Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latte, or PSL. We’ve talked about it before here. Its success as a product is based largely on the strong emotional association with Autumn that it has cultivated over the past couple of years. For many consumers, it simply isn’t Autumn until they’ve had their PSL.
To a lesser extent, other products manage to associate themselves very strongly with this season as well. Youd’d imagine that sales at major stationery stores such as Paperchase, Rymans or WHSmiths go up astronomically every September, as the lifelong association with September and new starts, as well as new stationery, drives us, even as adults, to buy more pencils in order to get that ‘back to school’ feeling.
Add to that ‘Autumn Sales’, with that new start feeling making consumers want to throw away the old and begin again with the new, not to mention the Autumn housing market.
The main lesson seems to be to link your brand to something your target audience have a strong emotional reaction to, and make sure that your marketing campaigns associates your product with it.
Good luck, and Happy Autumn!
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