How to Stay Fresh but Stay You with Branding for Seasonal Marketing

How Do You Stay “You” and Accomplish Something New?

We’re going to assume you have the best brand on earth (because we believe in you!).

You’ve got the right colors and a great logo. But there inevitably comes a time when your brand gets a little stale. When you’ve seen that blue three billion times. Or this same email opener three trillion times.

What happens then—when everyone’s so used to seeing your brand that it starts becoming background noise?

Here’s what NOT to do:

1. Freak out. (OK, maybe a little.)
2. Copy all the latest trends.
3. Scrap everything and completely redo your brand.

Your mission is to reach people and change lives! That’s worth holding onto. You want to stay fresh … but you also have to stay you. How do you do that?

The answer: branding for seasonal marketing (aka seasonal branding).

Here’s a quick rundown of how to develop branding for seasonal marketing:

1. Discovery: What needs to change and why?
2. Messaging: How do you want to sound?
3. Visuals: How do you want to look?
4. Application: Get your whole team onboard.

Bonus: Download a free seasonal brand checklist!

But First … What Exactly Is a Seasonal Brand?

Branding is intentional communication that invites your audience to join your mission in ways meaningful to them.

So seasonal branding is intentional communication that invites your audience to join your mission in different ways. Or it can invite a different audience altogether.

Branding for seasonal marketing is perfect for expressing a different side of your brand’s personality, capturing a new audience, or pivoting temporarily. Here’s when you might need a seasonal brand:

• Events and campaigns
• Holidays
• Sermon series
• Times of the year
• Leveraging trends

Pivot Summary

Next, sum up your seasonal brand changes in a pivot summary. Write one or two paragraphs explaining what’s changing and why. Share this with your entire team.

This summary is a bite-size reference for your entire team to understand the purpose of your seasonal brand. And it’s a resource to anchor in as you explore ideas. When you start making decisions down the road, you can hold up each idea next to your pivot summary to see if it fulfills your core idea or distracts from it.

Here’s Exponential’s pivot summary:

Exponential’s official brand and visual identity are a solid foundation to work from. However, they lack the connection and inspiration of our in-person gatherings and meetups.

For the rest of 2022 and into the 2023 Exponential Conference season, we’re setting our sights on what’s next by infusing our brand with joy, excitement, and energy! 

As we look ahead to the conversations, tears, triumphs, paradigm-shifting moments, and plain fun, we’re shifting how we speak and look to capture our conferences’ energy while anchoring in key elements of our current brand.

Notice that the pivot summary talks about these things:

• What’s not changing (what works about the current brand)
• Why the seasonal brand is needed (the gap you need to fill)
• Seasonal offering you’ll market
• Time frame the seasonal marketing campaign will run
• Tone of the seasonal brand
• The offering’s key distinctive or selling point

RELATED RESOURCE: Branding for Churches—The Ultimate Guide

We also wrote a brief explanation of how the messaging could achieve this tone, like by using emojis and mixing serious and lighthearted elements:

We operate at the cutting edge of twenty-first-century ministry, but we’re also human beings who like to talk with our friends. In this season, we’re leaning into a conversational tone: witty and informal at times, yet always informative, insightful, and practical.

We’re not afraid to throw in a few emojis right next to deep insights on reaching people for Jesus. A lot like a conversation among good friends.

Audience Persona

All great brands know exactly who they’re talking to. (And remember, you’ve got the best brand in the world!) Seasonal brands are no different.

So the next step is to develop an audience persona to hone in on who your brand is reaching in this season.

A persona is a fictional vignette of who you want to reach. It includes these elements:

1. Demographics: Age, gender, family, and employment
2. Psychographics: Hopes and fears
3. Shared win: How your organization helps these people specifically

Here’s Exponential’s persona for their seasonal conference brand:

Core audience: Men in their 30s who are church leaders (network and denominational leaders, lead pastors, thought leaders, etc.). Often have families with children.

Hope: Making an impact with their unique voices and gifts.

Fear: That they don’t matter.

What they’ll get: A place to share their voices, offer ideas, and find solutions that reenergize them and the communities they serve. A grassroots networking approach, not a top-down approach.

Brand Promise

Finally, synthesize your tone word, key distinctive, and audience hopes and fears into a brand promise. 

A brand promise is a phrase that summarizes your primary value to your audience in this season.

The message your brand promise communicates is the shared win. It promises to fulfill the audience hope so their fear isn’t met. The way your brand promise makes people feel is your tone word.

Exponential’s conference tagline is this: “Revive, recharge, refresh.”

It tells the core audience what they’ll get by attending the conference: a sense of renewal.

And the alliteration creates the feeling they’ll have at the conference: the exciting sense of energy building.

RELATED RESOURCE: Why Your Church Needs Strategic Messaging

Pulse Word

Similar to how you started with messaging, the first step in developing visuals is to choose a pulse word. A pulse word describes how you want the visuals to make people feel.

Exponential wanted people to feel vibrancy and excitement. They wanted people to feel how they’d feel at the conference. Here’s the pulse word we came up with for them, and a description of how we’d achieve that using specific design elements:

Life

In this season, we’re infusing our brand with life using visual elements to capture what it’s like to be part of the Exponential community. 

We’re using warm, bright colors and gradients, dancing light from the stage, and subtle textures.

Clean, sans-serif typography will sit neatly within the surrounding warmth: highlighting the message without taking too much attention (and we might even use a serif a time or two).

Finally, candid, color-rich photos of people will take center stage: people smiling, talking, laughing, sharing, and worshiping. We’ll use photos full of the warmth and life present in all our in-person gatherings.

Mood Board

Next, develop a mood board by gathering examples of trends you want to lean into that match the look and feel you want for your seasonal brand.

A mood board is one of our favorite parts of ideation. It’s when we expand by gathering all the ideas, and then contract as we set aside what we don’t like. It also helps us see commonalities among what we like so we can intentionally head in that direction.

Our go-to tool for developing mood boards is Pinterest. (You can even use the Pinterest plugin to save images to your board when you’re on other sites.) 

Here’s our process for creating mood boards:

1. Search Pinterest and other sites for as much inspiration as possible.
2. Look for examples of typography, colors, photography, graphic elements, and layouts.
3. Slim your mood board down to the 5–10 most important images as a guide for future design decisions.

Here’s part of our Exponential mood board. Notice that the mood board has ideas for fonts, photography styles, colors, and layouts for printed documents and social images.

Talk through the following with your team:

• What’s changing and why
• Messaging and visuals
• Who needs to do what and when

This is a prime time to share everything you’ve developed, from the pivot summary and audience persona to the brand promise and style overview. Then you and your team can figure out together what the next steps are.

For Exponential, since ArtSpeak was an external consultant, we held a wrap-up call with their team to talk through their seasonal conference brand.

Equipped with their strategy, messaging, and visuals, their team went on to develop a marketing campaign that included an event website, social and email campaigns, and printed items and merch. Here are some of our favorite examples: