The Power of New Year’s Resolutions in Marketing

The Power of New Year’s Resolutions in Marketing: How to Align Your Brand Goals with Consumer Behavior

New Year’s brings with it a powerful sense of renewal and change within many people. Towards the end of the year, they begin to self-reflect and create their New Year’s resolutions. Studies show that only about 9% of people achieve their New Year’s goal and about 43% quit their goal by the end of January. (Why Most New Year’s Resolutions Fail | Lead Read Today, 2023) You might feel misled by the blog title because, “How can New Year’s resolutions be that powerful if less than 10% of people achieve them?” 

Aligning Your Brand with Consumer New Year’s Resolutions  

New Year’s is a time when a significant trend in consumer behavior happens, giving businesses the opportunity to connect with customers by joining their personal growth journeys. Whether that is by helping their health journey with a gym membership, learning a new language with an app, or being a self-confidence-supporting staple in their wardrobe, businesses can harness the power of these New Year’s resolutions by aligning their brand goals with this consumer behavior. By this point, you may be asking, ‘How can I align my brand goals with my customers’ New Year’s resolutions?’ Or you may already be brainstorming ideas for how your brand can do this. At B&C, we use the following framework that you can use to help think through this as your beginning-of-the-year strategy to harness the power of New Year’s resolutions.

1. Define Your Value in Personal Growth

• Identify how your product or service contributes to self-improvement, wellness, or goal achievement.
• Align your brand with values like empowerment, progress, or learning (i.e., financial institutions can assist consumers with financial planning by offering guidance on budgeting and investing, while athletic clothing brands can provide tips on the best gym attire to support a new active lifestyle).
  • Peloton markets itself as more than just fitness equipment—it’s a community that fosters self-improvement and wellness. By offering guided workouts and live classes, they emphasize empowerment and progress, creating a sense of achievement for their users.

2. Meet Customers Where They Are

• Understand the stages of personal growth your audience is in (e.g., exploration, where customers are discovering options and gathering information; action, where they actively engage with products or services to pursue their goals; and reflection, where they evaluate their progress and consider next steps) 
• Create content or services tailored to each stage.
  • Nike’s content includes beginner workout plans for those in the exploration stage, performance gear for athletes in the action stage, and motivational stories or tools like the Nike Run Club app to encourage reflection and growth.

3. Build Emotional Connections

• Share relatable stories of growth or transformation involving your brand.
• Highlight customer testimonials that resonate with personal development themes.
  • Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign shares stories of everyday women embracing self-confidence and natural beauty, creating an emotional connection with their audience.

4. Provide Actionable Tools

• Offer resources that actively aid growth, such as guides, challenges, or tools.
  • Home Depot provides DIY guides, workshops, and project calculators to help customers complete home improvement projects with confidence.

5. Be a Partner, Not Just a Provider

• Foster two-way conversations through engagement and feedback loops.
• Celebrate customer milestones (e.g., achievements tied to your product).
  • Lululemon fosters two-way engagement through community yoga classes and feedback loops. They also celebrate milestones like “sweat dates,” encouraging customers to connect fitness with their lifestyle.

6. Inspire and Educate

• Share inspirational content that aligns with your brand’s mission.
• Provide educational content that empowers customers to take actionable steps.
  • Patagonia shares stories of environmental activism and provides educational content about sustainability. Their campaigns inspire action aligned with their mission of protecting the planet.

7. Integrate Seamlessly

• Position your brand as an organic part of daily habits or routines.
• Use subtle but consistent branding to reinforce the connection.
  • Apple Watch positions itself as a part of everyday life by tracking fitness, notifications, and health metrics, becoming indispensable in users’ daily routines.

8. Foster Community 

• Build spaces (physical or digital) for customers to share progress and connect.
• Promote peer-to-peer learning and shared experiences.
  • Lego builds community through its online platform, where customers share their creations, provide feedback, and participate in challenges, creating a collaborative and engaging space.

Obviously, this framework is valuable year-round, but at the start of the year, the momentum of New Year’s resolutions makes it easier to gauge where your audience is in their personal growth journey and tailor your messaging accordingly. Marketing is about building connections between the brand and its customers. Joining your customers’ personal growth journeys is another meaningful way to build that relationship. 

Create a brand that people turn to for guidance, inspiration, and actionable steps to help them achieve their goals. You can integrate this approach into your marketing strategy through channels like content marketing, blogs, email campaigns, and social media. If you notice that this helps retain customers, it can fuel future campaigns throughout the year by providing a better understanding of where they are in their customer journey. 

You wouldn’t go on a road trip to a place you’ve never been without directions, and the same applies to your marketing. You need clear direction and well-defined goals to measure the effectiveness of your strategy. These goals should be SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound). As you set these goals, remember to consider the customer journey and how your brand objectives align with it.

Since we know people are setting their resolutions in January, a potential brand goal could focus on lead generation: “We want to acquire 100 new customers by the end of January.” This goal can shift in the following months: “We aim for a customer retention rate of 75% from February through June.”

Once you’ve set your goals for the year, revisit the framework from earlier and consider which strategies will help you achieve them. Leveraging consumer behavior to shape your goals can guide you toward reaching these milestones, as it sets you up for success.

As much as we’d like it to be, successful marketing is not always a linear process. Even the most successful marketers don’t always hit their goals. Marketing is about predicting how people will behave in response to a given stimulus. Consumer behavior evolves over time, but by tracking our customers’ actions and reactions to our marketing tactics, we can gain a better understanding of how to strengthen our connection with them.

Review your strategies to identify what works best for your brand. If consumer behavior shifts, try to understand the reasons behind the change. Then, assess your future plans to determine where you can be strategic and seize opportunities before they turn into obstacles. 

Embrace the challenge of understanding and adapting to your customers’ evolving behaviors. By staying agile and proactive, you can turn every shift into an opportunity for growth and deeper connection. Now is the time to refine your strategies and position your brand for lasting success.