How to Sell Summer Products in the Winter

Consumer brands, particular food brands – from Campbells to Corona and Bacardi – have been trying for years to break out of a stubborn sales cycle dictated by a consumer perception of the brand’s seasonality, not to mention weather itself. Really, how many people crave a hot bowl of chicken noodle soup on a 95 degree summer day?

But a careful analytical social listening exercise, based on unstructured, publicly available data, shows that there are clever ways for brands to fight against seasonal slumps. As part of an internal test, Signafire decided to look at open-sourced surrounding Bacardi, a brand that is famously recognizable in summer, but decidedly cooler in winter. What we found revealed an interesting trend.

In some instances, up to 10% of mentions of the brand on social media made some reference to the 2003 song, “In The Club,” by rapper, 50 Cent. The song includes the lyrics: “Hey shorty it’s your birthday / We gon’ party like it’s yo birthday / We gon’ sip Bacardi like it’s your birthday.” So, by nature of the song’s reference to drinking Bacardi on birthdays, a significant amount of the population on social media was also making an inherent connection between the brand and birthdays. The song was released 15 years ago, yet continues to foster a widespread association with the Bacardi brand. By doing so, it has also inadvertently associated the Bacardi brand with a human commonality that lacks seasons altogether: birthdays.

Armed with this unstructured data, fused with the relevant structured, customer data that it collects regularly, Bacardi could be able to develop a marketing operation focused on birthdays. Who would have guessed that data fusion and content analytics could melt the snow of a long winter?