Climate change: Seasonal advertising feels the burn

Climate change is impacting bottom lines across businesses and while that may spell good news for certain industries, for the majority of them as well as the entirety of humanity, there’s little to cheer about.

While there are a host of issues coming out of extreme climate events and changes in weather patterns, both horribly tangible as well as more tenuous, the ultra-rapidity being seen in the shifting of seasons (multiple parts of the country experienced one-of-the-hottest February on record, with a heat wave expected to dominate much of the country in the coming weeks). All this is impacting everything from holiday plans to marketing strategies.

As Vivek Das, CEO FoxyMoron (Zoo Media), points out, unexpected weather patterns are becoming a norm, rather than an exception. “While governments and businesses are actively working on inventions, innovations and strategies to address the supply chain, marketing and advertising must adopt agile data and tech-enabled approaches.”

Ayush Wadhwa, Founder of OWLED Media and a digital content creator says, “With temperatures shifting rapidly from cold to hot and vice versa, it can be challenging to create advertising campaigns that effectively capture the attention of consumers during a particular season. This is because traditional seasonal advertising strategies that rely on specific temperature ranges or weather patterns are no longer as reliable as they used to be.”

For example, if a brand creates a spring-themed campaign but experiences unseasonably warm weather in the spring, the campaign may not resonate with consumers who are experiencing summer-like temperatures.

Das believes that MarTech transformation is key for this as it can exponentially enhances the response time – “A connected data ecosystem can enable signals from sales/consumption patterns correlated with weather changes across geographies, and ad tech can enable fast creative customisation, activation and optimisation at scale. Advertising must also take a leaf from Supply Chain, and be better prepared for such scenarios moving forward,” he says.

Vikas Kumar Mangla, Founder, Digital ROI, observes that as the traditional spring and autumn seasons in India become less defined, advertisers are adapting their strategies to better suit changing weather patterns and consumer behaviour.

“Advertisers have shifted from promoting seasonal clothing collections to versatile, weather-appropriate collections that can be worn in a variety of conditions. For example, they're promoting lightweight fabrics like cotton and linen that can be worn in both hot and cold weather,” he noted.

For Tanvi Bosmia, Associate Account Director, Brand Experience, SoCheers, it is easier to understand a customer’s behaviour with weather, which in turn helps in showcasing the usefulness of the product and its attributes in order to influence their purchasing decisions further. “Weather has a deep-rooted effect on a consumer’s psychology and buying behaviour overall. Interestingly, brands are always in a constant endeavour to craft marketing strategies according to that,” she says.

Deepak Pareek, Co-founder of Iceberg Creations, says, "Seeing the current weather changes and sudden variations in temperature, there are lots of advertising strategies that go for a toss. For example, a brand must have thought of coming up with cream during the cold weather but what if the cold weather doesn't last for long? The strategies, in that case, will go haywire.”

Quipping that pharma companies will benefit from seasonal changes and the effects on health, Pareek adds more seriously, “Holistically speaking, I don't see a lot of changes in advertising strategies since a lot of it is already pre-planned. As someone running a media production agency, we really like the way clients approach their vision irrespective of the changes and that's a green sign for us."

While solutions to climate change are still a hotly debated issue, pun unintended, experts are confident that agile brands and marketing agencies will and are adopting more flexible and adaptive strategies to create campaigns that can effectively reach consumers regardless of the weather.