Christmas Marketing for Boring Brands: In Defence of the Sprout

Nobody at his table asked for them, and nobody will finish them, but if they went missing his mother would notice before she noticed the turkey.

That is the most successful product of the Irish Christmas. It has never once had a good ad, and it has outlived most of the people who complained about it.

Yes, it’s September. The schools are barely back, the wasps are still drunk on the last of the apples, and here I am writing about sprouts like a man who has been left alone with the calendar for too long. I’d apologise, but the shops got there first. In a garden centre near where I live, someone has already inflated a ten-foot reindeer, and it’s watching the rest of us. Look, isn’t it hideous?

The problem is that September is when Christmas marketing actually gets decided, and it’s also when a certain kind of brand starts to get nervous.

Insurers, accountancy software firms, companies that sell industrial shelving or pensions or bin collection all arrive at the same apology. “We’re not really a Christmas brand.” What they mean is that December belongs to perfume and toys and whoever John Lewis is paying to make grown adults weep at a cartoon animal. They think anyone selling something useful should keep the head down until the January sales have passed.

I understand the instinct. I’d still argue with it, preferably before the first Mariah Carey sighting of the year.

Christmas is more practical than the ads suggest

The Christmas on television is a family resolving thirty years of grievances over one roast potato. The one that plays out in most Irish houses looks more like an audit.

The EY Ireland Consumer Pulse found that more than half of Irish adults planned to mix branded products with own-label alternatives last Christmas, and that spending wisely had turned into a quiet status symbol of its own. It also found Irish shoppers like straight talking, particularly at Christmas. Anyone who has been asked “and what are you doing with yourself now?” over the trifle will know the national appetite for a direct question.

KPMG’s Next Gen Retail survey came at it from another direction. Seventy-seven per cent of Irish shoppers expected Christmas to cost significantly more than the year before, and two in five planned to spend less. The rest presumably planned to spend it anyway and meet the consequences in January, which is also a tradition.

So people are worried about money and short on patience for anything that doesn’t work. For a sprout of a brand, that is about as close to home turf as the calendar gets.

An airport made the Christmas top ten

If “boring” still sounds like a death sentence, look at last year’s festive ad rankings. System1 tests every Christmas ad on real audiences for emotional response, and Heathrow’s “Must Be Love” came sixth with the maximum 5.9-star rating. Heathrow is a building where your dignity gets confiscated along with your shampoo.

Heathrow’s Christmas advertising has leaned for years on the one moment an airport gets to be sentimental, which is people coming home. Most boring products have a day like that somewhere in the calendar, if someone bothers to look.

Find your product’s Christmas job

A lot of so-called boring brands already have a part in Christmas. Nobody has written them the lines.

An insurer’s Christmas is a slow-motion catalogue of claims. There are burst pipes on St Stephen’s Day, parcels lifted off the step by someone in a nicer coat than yours, and an uncle reversing into the pillar with the confidence of a man on his fourth hot whiskey.

A pensions provider owns the long week between Christmas and New Year, when people sit on the couch with a selection box and do some quiet maths about their own mortality.

A Santa hat on the logo won’t help any of these. Someone noticing that the product already matters in December, and saying so plainly, will.

Search is where the boring problems live

While retailers bid each other into the ground for gift searches, a quieter layer of behaviour goes on underneath. People look up bin collection dates, what time the chemist opens on the 26th, travel insurance for the flight to Sydney, and how to claim for a telly that died during charades when uncle Gerry was trying to tell you the movie is Jaws.

These searches are specific and urgent, and in our experience they’re often far less contested than anything with the word “gift” in it.

That makes paid search an unusually good fit for dull brands in December. Nobody needs persuading that a burst pipe is bad. You just have to be there when someone is standing in two inches of water with a phone in one hand.

A proper Christmas campaign here is mostly housekeeping: seasonal ad copy, holiday hours in your assets, and landing pages that answer the question without a snowflake animation getting in the way. It’s unglamorous work. So is carving the turkey, and someone always has notes.

Social is where you’re allowed to be funny

Search catches people once the problem has arrived. Social is where you get remembered before it does.

System1’s data has a finding that should cheer up anyone without a Coca-Cola budget. Its review of the 2025 season singled out consistency as the lesson that cut through. It pointed to analysis showing that the most consistent brands see the biggest effects on long-term growth. In practice, that means finding one recognisable idea and having the nerve to run it for years, long after the marketing team is sick of it, which is roughly when customers start to notice.

For a boring brand, paid social is the cheapest place to test that idea. The funniest Christmas content from dull categories tends to aim at the category itself. Think of the absurdity of reading your home insurance small print by candlelight during a power cut, or the accountant who is the only person in the house quietly looking forward to January.

Aim the joke at your customers instead, and it gets screenshotted by someone with a large following and a free afternoon.

Timing matters more than tinsel

The big retail fight happens in November and the first fortnight of December. What follows, from roughly St Stephen’s Day to the first working Monday in January, is a kind of national fugue state. Nobody knows what day it is, there’s Pringles for breakfast, and plenty of advertisers have gone quiet.

That dead week is when people get round to the practical stuff. They switch energy provider, sort out the car insurance renewal, or open the pension statement that has been sitting on the hall table since October like a summons. If that’s what you sell, it could be the most useful week of your year, and one of the quietest.

Stop apologising for being useful

The trouble starts when a dull brand decides Christmas requires it to become someone else. Squeezed into a festive costume, it looks like a funeral director in a novelty jumper. A dull brand that turns up at the right moment and speaks plainly, maybe with one decent joke about itself, ends up looking like the most reliable thing in the room.

Which brings us back to the sprout. It has no brand character, no media budget and no fans under the age of forty. It turns up every year and does its job, and people would miss it if it didn’t.

Most brands would kill for that kind of loyalty. Plenty of boring ones already have it and haven’t noticed.

If your product is more sprout than sparkle, talk to us about a Christmas campaign that actually suits it. We promise not to put antlers on your logo.