Uh-oh, Your Marketing Calendar Is Solving Last Year's Problems

Somewhere, probably in a shared drive near you, there’s a content calendar with a "back to school" campaign slated to launch August 18th. It's been there since January. It doesn't know it's 104 degrees in South Carolina, that eggs are $7.50, or that half of us are now scared to eat fresh fruits and vegetables because there’s a cyclospora outbreak.

The old model of marketing assumed seasonal stability. It ran on predictability. Instacart could plan a year in advance to say "you're busy, we'll shop for you" because the problem was always time. That's still true. But it's not the whole problem anymore. Now it's: I'm busy, everything costs more, the local farm stand doesn't have peaches because of an El Niño pattern nobody explained to me, and I'm too tired to figure out what's actually safe to eat this week.

Same customer, same grocery run, completely different problem underneath it.

Most brands are still solving 2015's version of the problem with 2015's tone: upbeat, seasonal, on schedule. Meanwhile the person on the other end is dealing with heat advisories, grocery bills that jumped 23% since 2020, a rapid-fire, nerve frying news cycle, and a low-grade exhaustion that doesn't have a name yet. “Life Fatigue” maybe? It shows up as shorter attention, less patience for cleverness, and zero tolerance for a brand that sounds more energetic than the moment calls for.

If you’ve worked with Wheels Up at all, you know we are big fans of planning ahead to streamline production. This isn't a call to completely scrap your process and write everything each week from scratch. It is a call to actually look at what people are dealing with this week, not this quarter, and ask if your pre-planned message still makes sense. A "beat the heat" campaign written in March doesn't know that by July, "beat the heat" means something closer to “Amy is absolutely melting in South Carolina right now and she still has 2 solid months of summer to go, so she’s not particularly high functioning at the moment (insert face melting emoji here!!).”

My hunch is this is the new normal. “Life Fatigue” is here to stay. The brands that will stand out aren't going to be the loudest or the most consistent. They're going to be the ones paying attention in real time and swapping copy, tone, even offers, based on what's really happening outside—not what a calendar said six months ago. Yes, it takes more work than scheduling a quarter’s worth of posts in one sitting. But it's also the only version of "meeting people where they are" (i.e. relevancy) that still means anything.