It is Christmas Eve and I have counted forty-one emails in my inbox from brands that want me to know they are thinking of me during this special time of year. Forty-one. One of them is a project management tool.
The copy is close to identical across all of them. A slower pace. Cherished traditions. Gratitude for the community we have built together. Warm serif type sitting where a hard geometric sans lived in October.
A software company that spent eleven months yelling at me about velocity is suddenly writing about candlelight.
Which is the entire problem.
Warmth is not a season. It is either built into your brand or it is a coat you rent for six weeks, and the return date always shows.
Here is the part that gets lost. Nobody sits down on January 3rd and audits your tone. They do not need to. They get the New Year New Workflow email with the forty percent off banner nine days after the candlelight one, and something small and permanent happens. The warmth gets recategorized. It was not warmth. It was a quarter-four campaign wearing warmth.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. December is the one month a year when the pressure to be liked outruns the pressure to be distinct, so everyone reaches for the same three ingredients: family, quiet, a fireplace nobody in the company owns. The brief practically writes itself, which should be the warning.
The brands that survive the January whiplash are the ones with nowhere to swerve. Patagonia does not need a holiday voice because its ordinary voice is already about restraint and consequence, and a December ad about buying less is just Tuesday for them. Salt & Straw is warm in February. It is warm about a weird pear and blue cheese flavor in February, which is the point. The warmth is load bearing the other forty-six weeks, so December costs them nothing to write.
If your seasonal voice requires a different font, a different sentence length, and a different set of values, you have not extended your brand. You have replaced it, temporarily, with a nicer one.
The brands that survive the January whiplash are the ones with nowhere to swerve.
The test I like is simple. Take your best December line, strip the snow and the year, and try to run it in April. If it still sounds like you, keep it. If it sounds like a stranger being nice to me, you have found the costume.
Truffles has been asleep under the tree since noon and Barnaby knocked an ornament into the radiator, and neither of them has opinions about tonal consistency. I am typing this with the good lamp on. It is a nice night, and I mean that in April too.