Cutting Through the Holiday Noise with Brand Identity

This year, overall holiday spending is up 7% from 2023, with 52% of consumers planning to complete their shopping after Thanksgiving. It points to more lucrative opportunities for brands to reach millennials, who carry the bulk of that holiday expenditure, and Gen Z, whose holiday budgets have grown by 59% over the past two years. But it’s not as simple as greater seasonal spending translating to greater returns for brands. As retailers struggle to stand out from the year’s routine campaign calendar, the question is not “What are you doing for the Holidays?” but rather, “What are you doing to cut through the Holiday noise?”

The 2024 Holiday Season: a nuanced social landscape

Holiday shopping has evolved: millennials are more likely to purchase experiences and outings as gifts and spend on travel, whereas Gen Z is divided between higher digital spending and more savvy discount-oriented shopping in the face of economic strain. Throw in the marketing world moving full force into a social-first approach, and the 2024 holiday shopping season is rife with nuance, divisive segments, and higher competition than ever before.

Holidays 2024 is not the time for recycling previous years’ approaches, and it’s certainly not the time for guesswork. Spray-and-pray tactics tend to get buried in the noise during the holiday season. So where does that leave us?

It’s time to double down on your brand ethos, the core of your identity, and extend it into the holiday season to drive impact with your target shoppers. Here’s the breakdown of how to do it, from Viral Nation’s experts in social-first marketing, for a campaign that’s memorable, resonant, and on brand.

Find Your Holiday Story

Rather than simply joining in the broader holiday conversation, brands that carve out their own space will make their voices heard. Attempting to tap into every festive trend or calendar event can feel disingenuous, and dilutes your brand’s message.

Instead, narrow down your narrative to the most authentic angle for your brand, spotlighting a core aspect of your brand identity. What’s the main character of your holiday narrative? 

Take Equinox’s unconventional and polarizing “We Don’t Speak January”. The anti-new-years-resolution campaign forbade new membership signups on January 1st. It spread like wildfire, garnering backlash across social media — but only from users who didn’t belong to Equinox’s target audience.

The creative decision worked because it was seamlessly in line with their brand ethos: Equinox is for the committed.

By pointing out that 70% of people who sign up for gyms in January stop going within weeks, while 95% of Equinox members stay committed for a year, they underlined their core values. They appealed not to the masses, but to their target audience: the committed fitness enthusiast, the long-term member, and the elite who appreciate the insider allure of an exclusive message.

They saw a 504% increase in brand conversation, 2.4 billion earned media impressions, and record traffic to their website. 

The lesson? Taking a stance is powerful — so long as it’s on brand.

The Story of a Holiday Sale

More broadly, your holiday campaign does not need to align directly with holiday messaging, nor even the concept of holiday shopping. Classic holiday themes are not a prerequisite for holiday campaigns, and brands don’t need to go all-in on Christmas or Black Friday if that doesn’t align with their image.

In fact, as shoppable tentpoles, Christmas and Black Friday are bloated by promotional content. Our community management team notes the power of surprise and delight tactics to cut through the noise and engage your audience outside of key holiday sales.

Abercrombie & Fitch has mastered this, capturing their audience’s attention, building positive brand sentiment, and fostering brand loyalty with their viral stackable codes. Through their affiliate program and organic fans, creator-led content spikes each time Abercrombie has new stackable codes, helping social shoppers get the best deal possible. The most recent example connects with the launch of their holiday party collection — offering discount codes beyond high-traffic days like Black Friday:

Whatever the main character of your brand’s holiday story looks like, it must resonate with your core audience’s values and lifestyle. Your strategic focus will allow you to stand out with the group that matters most to your brand, even in a saturated marketplace.

Tap Into a Cultural Moment

Retailer Shoppers’ Report confirms the trend driving Viral Nation’s social-first marketing experts: with higher costs and more competition in the e-commerce space, building loyalty and retention is paramount to driving a brand’s impact. 81% of consumers require trust in a brand before purchasing from them, and 56% say they want brands to be more relatable on social media.

Brands that are agile in their community-centric strategies will see higher resonance across social media efforts as they respond to their audience’s needs and expectations, demonstrating trustworthiness and humanized authenticity.

One proven way to demonstrate relatability and humanize behavior on social media is by tapping into a cultural moment. Caveat: as discussed above, make sure the conversation you join via your brand’s social persona makes sense in the context of your brand identity. 

For your holiday inspiration, here are two cultural moments the social media experts at Viral Nation are seeing take over this season that we believe can be seamlessly adopted in any number of creative, on-brand ways.

90s Kid Nostalgia

To build trust and positive brand sentiment, seek to forge an emotional connection with your audience. The most powerful consumer emotion of today’s holiday season? Nostalgia.

While millennials recall the 90s and early 2000s as a “golden era”, with pop culture, retro technology, and the early internet serving as cultural touchpoints, the appeal of 90s nostalgia is cross-generational, making it a powerful emotional marketing technique. 37% Gen Z consumers report being nostalgic for the 1990s, despite not being alive for most of it.

Brands have leveraged idealized fascination with times gone by again and again, with great success. Notably, in 2022 Skims launched their Icons collection, with a campaign centered around iconic and familiar 1990s supermodels. The campaign was able to tap into Gen Z’s romanticism of the 90s while also expanding their consumer base, targeting both millennials and Gen X with the use of familiar faces and a humanizing message around body positivity.

Homemade Christmas 

The appeal of the homemade aesthetic and all things made-from-scratch on social media is similar to 90s nostalgia in that it draws on a comforting aesthetic to elicit an emotional connection and audience engagement. But here, the strong focus on experience and togetherness sets the trend apart and makes it perfectly coded for the holidays.

The cultural resonance of homemade comes from the understanding that the holiday season goes beyond holiday shopping. Rather than spotlighting gifting and retail promotion, brands seeking to forge an emotional connection for lasting impact can look to the elements of the season that connect back to real-life experiences. A homemade approach to the holidays can command consumers’ attention and respond to their interests by spotlighting products and services that offer “how-to”s, DIY content, made-from-scratch guides, and aspirational projects or events. Some themes that are ideal for a homemade or from-scratch holiday aesthetic are:

• Home decor and traditions around holiday decorating
• Holiday parties and entertaining
• Seasonal events (think pageants, markets, and parades)
• Winter sports and outdoor activities

By emphasizing the aesthetic of an at-home holiday, brands go against the grain of the holidays as a shoppable tentpole event. Instead, focusing on community and traditions that exist outside of shopping fosters a genuine connection, creating experiences rooted both in emotional resonance and brand association.

Here are a couple of our social strategy team’s favorite examples of campaigns that tapped into the cultural moment of a homemade holiday:

• • In 2020, IKEA teamed up with DIY, homemade, and relationship-focused content creators for their “Four Weeks of Wonder” campaign. With themes around decorating, cooking, and celebrating, the campaign’s message addressed the scaled-back and at-home nature of the holiday season in lockdown. However, given that millennials are more likely to spend money on experiences and Gen Z is more likely to shop strategically in the face of economic strain, the concept remains just as relevant today.
  • Crate & Barrel’s influencer partnerships for Holiday recipes emulate the relationship-centric feeling of homemade by emphasizing family recipes and cultural traditions around holiday food. By promoting classic holiday fare with culinary creators and linking back to the recipe shared on their site, Crate & Barrel leverages a humanized holiday approach that connects directly to their sales platform.

Brand Identity Meets Social Persona

In a season filled with noise, the most effective way to resonate with holiday consumers is by engaging and creating where they organically consume content. In the case of the holiday season’s most pivotal shoppers, Gen Z, it means standing out on social media to make an impact.

Here, Skims shines yet again as an agile and of-the-moment brand to watch. Their 2024 holiday campaign features multi-platinum pop star Tate Mcrae and unveils Viral Nation Talent Mark Estes of Montana Boyz fame as their holiday face of Skims’ Men on the very same day that Estes was named a winner in People Magazine’s Sexiest Men Alive.

The connection between creator campaigns and positive brand sentiment is clear to see from the comments section, where followers celebrate Estes’ connection to the campaign and applaud Skims for being in the know with a TikTok star on the rise.

Successful social-first holiday campaigns aim for lasting brand recognition, going beyond the product to create an experiential moment rooted in relevant culture to inspire emotion and a sense of community belonging. Ultimately, social-first holiday content must be sharable and socially reproducible to drive engagement and convert to sales. 

For an example that merges the power of nostalgia, takes a stance rooted in brand identity, and adopts a strong social-first approach, let’s look at the 2024 revival of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.

Case Study: Victoria’s Secret Identity

This year, the Victoria’s Secret fashion show — once a seasonally-rooted cultural phenomenon — returned to the runway for the first time since 2019, reoriented for the social-first world. Featuring nostalgic icons like Tyra Banks and a musical performance by Cher alongside a noticeably more inclusive and diverse cast, the show’s return for the 2024 holidays highlights the lingerie brand’s choice to anchor in their core identity while balancing the shifting demands and desires of Gen Z consumers.  

Announced on social media in May, #VSFS content quickly became the most-viewed and engaged with posts on Victoria’s Secret’s TikTok and Instagram. Optimized for sharability and participation, the brand’s owned socials invited followers to share their favorite moments from the event. The event hashtags have since racked up over 600K UGC posts of hype and highlights — Kate Moss’ runway walk among them, nodding to the brand’s recognition of its power as a nostalgic legacy brand. Viral Nation’s VP, Creative & Experiential, Brandon Lentino, underlines the power of UGC:

“Creating moments that generate UGC is essential to a brand’s social strategy. By successfully doing so, brands can harness consumer content and engagement that is agile, high-volume, and authentic. Brands who run impactful, large-scale holiday campaigns will prompt audiences to generate UGC — organically extending the conversation to social and ultimately maximizing the ROI of the campaign. If you want to understand the voice of a brand on social, you must look at those who follow it.”

On TikTok, a video of Adriana Lima backstage created a viral sound clip saying “Welcome back to the Victoria’s Secret fashion show”, set to a gamified filter that puts the event’s reach and resonance in the hands of its community:

The brand’s owned socials also adopted an unfiltered and humanized approach to the event, in contrast to the fashion show’s previous existence as an edited television special. Similar to the revamp seen in the values driving casting choices, the brand’s social media presence was likewise more geared towards their Gen Z audience’s attention, sharing behind-the-scenes and getting-ready content as well as clips from the runway.

User-generated content has been found to boost brand engagement by 20%. By focusing their social media efforts on unfiltered, sharable, and reproducible content, Victoria’s Secret connected the event to the power of UGC for building reach, click-through, and trust — ultimately strengthening community trust via two-way interactions with their audience.

Finally, perhaps the most striking change made in the 2024 iteration of the show was its availability. Geared towards the modern media consumer, the fashion show was live-streamed on Prime, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Following the live stream, the brand shared the fashion show in full on their YouTube channel, where it has since been viewed over 25 million times.

Brand Identity for Impact

Ultimately, this holiday season is an opportunity to go beyond adding your brand’s voice to the seasonal noise. The most successful campaigns will stand out not through broad appeal, but through deep, authentic connections with the consumers that matter most.

Brands can drive impact by digging deep into the essence of brand identity and seeking to authentically spotlight brand ethos. By finding a distinct holiday narrative, tapping into relevant cultural moments, and prioritizing trust-building and positive sentiment across social media, brands can create a lasting impact that resonates with their target audience through the holidays and beyond.