Marketing and the Weather
Can your product or brand marketing be influenced by the weather? It’s something to consider. Weather impacts product sales for things like cold or hot foods, big pharma – think of allergies, colds, coughs, flu, and even seasonal depression, clothing, accessories such as hats, umbrellas, and the like, protective gear from wildfires – and various filter changes from the same, and so much more.
Now consider marketing such products beside weather reports locally, through a service such as AccuWeather, The Weather Company or on a social media platform where you show a video of your product next to the current weather conditions in areas associated with where your target audience works or lives. Using location-based announcements to smartphones showing near the location may also be a good use of weather and marketing messages together.
The Leo Burnett agency found that on bad hair days, women will often switch hair products. Pantene used that in a campaign about “imminent bad-hair weather” alerts. They saw a 24% sales increase of their products during the summer of 2013 (compared to the same time in 2012) at Walgreens stores. That’s what tying weather information with your product can accomplish.
Chris Pierantozzi from Saatchi & Saatchi told how they used Watson as a chatbot between products and potential customers by asking questions when they went to the weather section to find out what customers knew of products and what they liked or didn’t. Toyota was one of the companies trying this innovation.
Lily Won at Saatchi & Saatchi said: “We would have never thought that people would have cared about how fast the Prius Prime can go, but we actually had quite a bit of questions around speed.” They thought differently after seeing many questions about how fast it could accelerate from zero to 60.
Edwin Grant Dexter started research on the impact of weather on human behavior back in 1904. A recent report from The Drum said people are at optimal happiness in temps between 61-75. The longer that temp lasts, the more likely people are to do retail shopping, while rainy days tends to drive them to indoor activities such as hitting the movie theater. High temps and winds push up the sales of juice, tire sale go up on clear-sky days with higher temps. So, is it time for you to start thinking about when your product might sell better as relating to weather conditions. How can you use apps or services to further test your theory, and how can you use that information to increase your sales.
Strong consumer beauty PR firms include 5WPR and Alison Brod PR.
