Invention and repetition – the two faces of Christmas copywriting
A chum of mine has an annual tradition of seeing how early and how often she will spot some variation of the phrase ‘wrapped up’ in Christmas campaigns. She is rarely disappointed. Or rather, I suppose, she is frequently disappointed.
Stroll around town, leaf through a magazine, point your face and mind towards the massive, flickering box in the corner of the room and you will experience the full spectrum of Christmas marketing language.
And, like my pal, you will no doubt come across the same expected phrases more than seems reasonable. ’Tis the season to be predictable.
But stepping out of my tight and desperately unflattering ‘cynical pants’, I prefer to look at the situation a little differently. Yes there is a proliferation of Christmas clichés that are the copywriting equivalent of buying a loved one an Argos gift voucher. But amongst that there is a growing trend for brands to find creative and imaginative ways to, as it were, step into Christmas.
There is a growing recognition that customers cannot be hauled towards a particular campaign simply with a random arrangement of signature festive expressions. Instead brands are increasingly asking themselves what Christmas looks like through the prism of their own unique voice and values.
The unexpected, inspiring and sometimes challenging takes on festive shopping are no longer the preserve of edgy outsiders like Ted Baker and Urban Outfitters. Instead brands with any sense of how easily derivative language is lost amongst the ferocious competition surrounding them are tearing up the big book of Christmassy words and attacking it with the vigour and invention they apply to any ‘blank canvas’ brief.
Rather than meekly conforming to a blanket Christmas universe, clever copywriting is allowing brands to set up their own distinct festive villages – ownable and evocative experiences that do more than just put a twist on the expected Christmas lexicon, instead driving the whole jolly business down their own personal path.
Perhaps this shift towards brands shaping their own Christmas story throws a starker light on those brands that are shackled to the cosiness of predictability. I personally struggle to understand how any brand begins the process of crafting their festive language without first filtering out anything and everything they have seen several times before. I certainly don’t know of many copywriters who don’t wince at the sight of a line that has been around, in one form or another, for years.
So Christmas language this year remains something of a mixed bag. Some lines are the safe, carrot-nosed, coal-buttoned snowmen we see each year. Others are enormous, anatomically correct snow genitals, constructed clandestinely in a neighbour’s garden. And I suppose it’s just important, to the industry and to customers, that some brands remember it’s a time for giving, not giving up.