How Three Different Brands Embraced Summer and How You Can Too
A brand lives and breathes by its identity, voice, and persona. Creating a brand means forming the fundamental identity that drives how you want the world to perceive your product. And as anyone in the branding game will tell you, it can be a daunting task.
Do you want your product to be associated with a specific season or do you want it to be evergreen and shift your voice to other channels? There’s a mountain of brands that have been successful in both camps and knowing what direction to take can sometimes feel like a coin flip. Luckily, there are a couple of key brands that we’ve selected and studied to help give you insights.
The Right Product For The Right Season
The decision to completely embrace a season isn’t isolated to a calendar year, but to the mentality it offers. Summer isn’t just a phase of the earth’s cycle, it’s a mentality, an attitude, a posture. A mindset of freedom, exploration, and enjoyment.
In school, summers were a time of excitement and adventure. It was a topic everyone bragged about when the new school season started back up. In the workplace, summer is a time for vacations, 3-day weekends, and spending them in relaxation.
A brand that epitomizes this mindset is the extreme sports behemoth Vans.
Vans – The Brand That Summer Made
Vans hinges its identity on edge-setting exploration, youthful enthusiasm, and above all else, fun. Hop onto their Instagram and you’ll be witnessing a feed that structurally embraces the idea of being outside, having a blast, and looking cool as shit doing it.
A kid crushing a buttery FS Smith Grind on a repurposed swimming pool, Dak Roche hopping off a drain tunnel in the middle of a sunny day. And when are all the photos taken?
Fucking summer.
Why? Because summer is the atmospheric backdrop to the free-spirited embodiment they exude. Ask any person on the street what comes to mind when you bring up Vans, and you’d be hard-pressed to find an answer that isn’t summerset.
And that’s a tactfully manufactured persona by a brand that knows exactly what the fuck it is, unabashedly. And a brand that knows what it wants to be perceived as, attracts a demographic that wants to have that experience.
I have a pair of C&L Era 59s inspired Vans that are thrashed to shit. Grease stains from working on my car, beer stains from getting a bit too rowdy in a garage show pit, and a couple of worn holes in the heal from pushing too hard on my longboard on the greenway.
My well loved, well traveled Vans. Much adventure had in these bad boys.
A shoe from a brand that designed a product for that exact experience. A brand that embraces a youthful mentality, with a social media that is set on sunny days, with great friends.
This experience isn’t isolated to just apparel or sports, however. No matter if it’s the dead of winter and all you want to do is go outside without having to bundle 5 layers of jackets, socks, coats, and long johns – the daydream of wanting to escape the frostbitten hellscape you find yourself in can creep up to even the most snow-gazed veteran.
You’re looking for an escape.
You start to reminisce about being at the park with your friends, the summer sun beating down on you, and what’s this? An ice-cold Corona is in the cooler, waiting to be cracked open.
Cold Drink On A Hot Day
Corona is the beer that no matter the season, always makes you think of cookouts, tacos, or (for better or worse) The Fast and The Furious.
Corona has leveraged its identity on a season, a posture of being in a mental or physical vacation. The brand colors are tailor-made to evoke this same ideology.
The Corona Blue, rich cobalt that mirrors the clear coastal skies on a Mexican beach that’s as expansive and mesmerizing as the Pacific Ocean blending into the horizon.
Corona Gold, a rich goldenrod yellow that is impossible to separate from the warm and refreshing summer sun.
Combined, these colors alone are evocative of warmth, liveliness, and pleasure. These succinct brand decisions are as potent and concentrated as the experience they wish to portray.
Summer Slack
But it’s not just B2C brands that exude this kind of swagger, B2B brands can also live in the summer space. And they can do so without having to overstate it.
Consider workplace staple Slack. While their social media profile and website don’t say anything direct about summer, the bright colors utilized and the vibrant imagery are reminiscent of warmer weather and the style and fashion we associate with summer.
Here is a brand that speaks to businesses, leveraging so much of what we find appealing about summer, without ever saying “summer” in their work. It’s a beautiful and simple example of how even the aesthetic of summer can influence the design and posture of your band.
In Like The Seasons
As we said at the top – a brand lives and breathes by its persona – its identity. Some brands use seasons as a building block for their persona, like Corona, or even Vans.
Some use it as a deep inspiration – such as Slack.
And some merely borrow it for a time, before the fall or winter roll around.
The visual embodiment of these varied uses swings wildly from market to market, but the fundamental nature of what the summer season communicates is unwavering.
Is it appropriate for your brand? Maybe, maybe not. But knowing what you are as a company is what matters, and if Vans, Corona, and Slack can do it, anyone can.
Trying to figure out how to best use summer to your advantage.
Reach out to us and ask.