Why Christmas Is the Only Time Marketing Makes Sense

Now that the festive season has faded and February is in full swing, the familiar marketing pattern has returned. All the emotional Christmas films are gone. The music, the warmth, the storytelling have disappeared. What we see again is discount banners, retargeting, “last chance” messages and performance dashboards. As Mark Ritson writes, Christmas is over and so is effective advertising. For a few weeks in December brands were behaving like brands. Now they are back to behaving like sales machines.

Which is strange, because December is when advertising actually works best.

Every Christmas the same thing happens. Brands that spend most of the year chasing clicks and conversions suddenly slow down. They stop shouting. They stop pushing offers. They make proper films. They use music, characters and stories. Often the product barely appears. And yet these are the ads people remember.

John Lewis, Coca-Cola and Amazon don’t just run Christmas campaigns. They create Christmas rituals. People wait for them. They talk about them. They share them. That simply does not happen with programmatic banners and non-skippable bumper ads.

This is not a coincidence. Christmas is almost the only time of year when brands are allowed to talk like humans. For the rest of the year they are expected to talk like sales departments. In December, emotion and storytelling become acceptable again.

The human brain is also different at Christmas. People are more nostalgic, more open, more emotionally available. Family, belonging and memory come to the surface. We are not in spreadsheet mode, we are in story mode. In that state, brands do not compete as products. They compete as feelings.

This is exactly what Ehrenberg-Bass has been telling the industry for years. Brands grow by building mental availability — by being easy to think of and easy to feel good about. System 1 calls this processing fluency: how easily consumers can recognise and attribute creative work to a specific brand. Simply put, when something feels familiar, it feels right. Christmas advertising is a fluency engine. The music, the colours, the characters and the tone all get stored in memory and linked to positive emotion.

Short-term performance marketing does almost the opposite. It is very good at harvesting demand, but very bad at creating it. It generates clicks and conversions, but it does not build memory. Christmas advertising, by contrast, does the unglamorous but valuable job of making a brand easier to remember and easier to choose later.

Coca-Cola’s Christmas truck is the classic example. It has been running for decades and it still works — even when AI is used to reproduce it for the hundredth time. When it appears, people know Christmas has arrived. The product hardly matters anymore. Coke has become a feeling.

John Lewis achieved the same through its lovable animals, lonely characters and bittersweet stories. These films are not really about retail. They are about warmth, kindness and humanity. And that emotional meaning sticks to the brand.

Amazon showed something even more interesting this year. One of its most visible Christmas films — the sleigh-riding Grannies — was not new at all. It was a rerun from 2023. And yet it still performed strongly, was widely shared and felt fresh to most people. That should make marketers uncomfortable, because the industry is obsessed with the idea that creative “burns out” quickly.

In reality, memory is built through repetition. We do not love a song because we hear it once. We love it because we hear it many times. The same applies to advertising. Emotional stories get stronger as they repeat. Characters, music, visual cues and tone become familiar, and familiarity turns into trust. Ehrenberg-Bass calls this distinctive brand assets doing their job. System 1 calls it compound creativity, where everything adds up and is amplified in the customer’s head.

Talking about grannies, these septo-octogenarians have become some of the most powerful recurring figures in modern Christmas advertising, precisely because they carry emotional weight, vulnerability and instant humanity in a way no glossy young family ever could. This is especially true in telco. Think of the Vodafone film with the elderly couple stealing a taxi for a night of freedom, or the Christmas ad from a few years ago where two grumpy old shopkeepers — almost like a festive Odd Couple — slowly move from rivalry to friendship as they discover they are both deeply lonely.

These characters work because they compress so many of the season’s themes into a single human face: time running out, missed connections, memory, kindness, and the hope that it is never too late to belong.

What Christmas really exposes is how upside-down most marketing has become. Brands spend eleven months optimising for short-term numbers and then, in December, they accidentally remember how brands are actually built. Or in the case of the US, the Superbowl also provides some additional brand-heavy entertainment in February.

This is why brands need to extend the festive logic across the year. Not by pretending it is Christmas in July, but by keeping the same rules. Long-term growth comes from repeating emotionally charged, distinctive stories until they become part of people’s mental furniture. You do not need twelve different creative ideas. You need one strong emotional territory that gets reinforced again and again.

Brand owners can learn three uncomfortable things from Christmas.

1. First, emotion is not the soft stuff; it is the hard driver of memory and choice.
2. Second, repetition is not waste — it is how brands are built.
3. And third, consistency beats novelty when it comes to long-term effectiveness.

The best Christmas campaigns do not win because they are new. They win because they feel known. They feel like something we have always had. That is what brands should be trying to achieve in every month of the year.

December simply reminds us what we already know but usually choose to ignore: people buy what they recognise, what they trust, and what feels emotionally familiar. The brands that dare to keep building that familiarity after the Christmas lights come down are the ones that grow.

The insight was written by László Aczél, Managing Faculty member at Corvinus-SEED.