Every October, brands start to look strangely similar.

Feeds turn orange and black. Pumpkins appear where logos used to be. Cobwebs creep into graphics. Captions become “spooktacular”.

Then Halloween ends, Christmas begins and the whole thing happens again. Red and green replace orange and black, snow starts falling across social posts and almost every product somehow finds itself wearing a Santa hat.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with any of this. Seasonal cues work because we recognise them instantly. But I do think there’s a difference between looking like you understand the season and actually having a relevant role in it.

And sometimes, in trying so hard to look culturally relevant, brands end up looking more like each other.

Culture is more than what it looks like

When we think about Halloween creatively, the obvious place to start is with its visual language. Pumpkins, costumes, horror, ghosts, sweets.

But those are really just the surface.

Halloween is also nostalgia. It's the excuse to dress up as someone else. It's horror-film marathons, childhood memories, nights out, staying in, trick-or-treating, mischief and the strange enjoyment we get from deliberately scaring ourselves.

Christmas is the same. The visual icon might be snow, presents and fairy lights, but the culture around Christmas is much bigger. It's travelling home, gifting pressure, family traditions, office parties, hosting, nostalgia, spending too much money and debating when it's socially acceptable to put the tree up.

That's where seasonal marketing becomes much more interesting to me.

Because cultural relevance isn't necessarily about reflecting what an occasion looks like. It's about understanding how people actually experience it.

The calendar shouldn't be the strategy

One useful way of thinking about cultural relevance is through three things: cultural truth, consumer truth and brand truth.

The cultural truth is what's happening around a particular moment. The consumer truth is why people care about it. And the brand truth is what gives a brand a credible reason to be there.

Seasonal marketing starts to fall flat when we focus on the cultural moment and forget about the other two.

Halloween is happening, therefore we need Halloween content.

Valentine's Day is happening, therefore something we sell needs to become heart-shaped.

Social media probably makes this temptation even stronger. There is always another awareness day, cultural moment, trend or occasion that brands could respond to. Before long, the content calendar starts deciding what the brand talks about rather than the other way around.

But being present isn't necessarily the same as being relevant.

Sometimes the better creative decision is working out which moments a brand can genuinely add something to, and which ones it can leave alone.

Don't throw away the things that make you recognisable

There's another tension here that I find interesting.

Brands spend years building recognition. Colours, typography, photography, characters, language, sounds and other distinctive assets slowly become associated with them.

Then October arrives and everyone turns orange.

Distinctive brand assets become valuable through consistency. So when brands temporarily replace their own visual language with the visual language of an occasion, they risk giving away exactly what makes them recognisable.

A simple test is to imagine the seasonal asset without the logo.

If it could just as easily belong to five competitors, the brand may have successfully communicated Halloween. It just hasn't necessarily communicated itself.

That doesn't mean seasonal creative can't look seasonal. It means the occasion should work with the brand rather than temporarily replacing it.

Find the overlap

The strongest seasonal ideas usually have a connection that goes deeper than the date in the calendar.

It might be something about the product that becomes particularly relevant at that time of year. A behaviour the audience already associates with the season. A problem that suddenly becomes more noticeable. A tradition the brand can play with, or even challenge.

Once there's a genuine connection between the brand and the moment, you don't have to work quite so hard to prove that the content is seasonal. The idea itself does that.

And that's where I think the creative opportunity actually sits: finding something about the occasion that feels natural for the brand to own, rather than taking an idea anyone could use and applying the brand afterwards.

Let the season enter the brand's world

I think that's the part we sometimes get backwards.

Seasonal marketing often takes a brand and dresses it up as the occasion. But the more interesting creative challenge is keeping the things that make the brand recognisable and finding a way for the occasion to exist within that world.

That doesn't mean getting rid of pumpkins, snowflakes or hearts. Sometimes they're exactly right.

They just shouldn't be the idea.

Because the best seasonal marketing shouldn't make a brand feel more like the season. It should make the season feel more like the brand.