Where’s my new pencil case?

Opinion

Lego’s Emily Fairhead-Keen explains why she’ll be glad to see the back of September and how brands could reinvent this moment in the buying calendar.

We’re all familiar with the seasonal dynamics that Back to School brings.

Feeds are bloated with the standard September tropes, hackneyed lines and rituals. From back-to-school photos and parents reflecting on the summer past to commercial reminders to secure another clothes-naming innovation before term starts.

With market spend of +£12.5 bn, September bursts with familiar categories, from retail to automotive, entertainment, and financial services. Other categories flaunt the timing as fresh-start territory and the opportunity to change behaviour, with mental health and wellness categories testing the benefits of September as another fresh start akin to January.

I’d argue the industry became a little lazy with this seasonal opportunity, and September has become its own cliché: transactional, rational, and empty of emotion.

It’s become a motion which brands go through, and, to an extent, people. Rituals we come to expect in feeds from individuals and brands; close your eyes and you can see them. Familiar categories, predictable messaging, stereotyped output.

I think if brands stopped thinking about how September is, in theory and unpicked the emotions and leaned into the realities of the month, we might get to some out-of-seasonal category entry points, drive work which touches the emotional nerve with parents, and grow a seasonal opportunity for those categories not part of the September set.

My emotional reality is, I personally hate September

I don’t skip to buy patent Mary Janes for my family or lean into the new ways social media tells me I can spin my minced meat.

For me, it is not a beginning, but a feeling that ‘it’s all over’. The jazz hands of summer, curling up and dying beneath my feet, with a limp crunch. The sense of an ending.

I feel September’s trickery (balmy summer days and cold autumn mornings, waiting for it all to finish), daylight being chipped away, back to school blemished with back-at-home flus and noroviruses within hours.

September for me is the passing of time, the long days of raising children, gone in the years which fly by before you’ve had a chance to be fully present in them.

I wonder if brands could offer the 14m parents in the UK, instead of patent new shoes and iron-on labels, the following:

The feeling of hope a new pencil case offers. We’re familiar with the stationery boom and nostalgic yearning of the feeling of it – the hope it brings for the year ahead for our kids. But what if we could bring that same feeling of new stationery to parents?

What if educational bodies for adults and short course categories advertised now, masterclass options from the news brands and subscription categories from print brands, offered parents wells of learning and the educational richness which this time brings.

What if September injected hope, not the grief I have, for parents by mobilising new category windows for adults as well as kids. Not a new gym membership but a pathway to a new life.

The comfort September might need for parents. What if September became the time for treats and small indulgences, for grownups?

The beauty category offering small pick-me-ups for darker days. Indulgent treat categories offering parents rewards for the first week back, the travel industry dipping its toes into a fount of people craving another break before the work has even begun.

Face into the passing of time. Instead of polished performance, funny memes, and insurmountable parent-to-parent funnies from influencers about what throwing a first/second/third child out the door looks like. What if brands truly flipped the tropes on their head and got into the realities of what this time feels like? The stuff we all know happens, but it takes a brand to say ‘we get you’.

What if brands acknowledged September as a marker of passing time, the feeling of loss, and worked into more emotional space? Epic, heartfelt storytelling space that dwells on this fleeting moment in a lifetime, not a transient moment in time.

What if brands renamed the time as an ending, not a start?

As ‘The End of Summer’ season. Face the ending by letting new categories reinvent what that new beginning might look like.

The ending implies a hole; we don’t like holes as humans, but an ending lets the industry craft the new beginning without relying on tropes and clichés.

Emily Fairhead-Keen is group head of strategy at The Lego Group