Which Holidays Should You Include in Your Marketing Strategy? (for Expat Language Schools)
By deciding to post about a holiday, ignore it or acknowledge its shortcomings, more often than not, you’re making a stand. As a consequence, you might alienate or even offend people. You may get yourself into discussions about values, moral or ethical issues. That’s why it’s vital for you to know your clients as well as possible before you decide to celebrate or even acknowledge this specific holiday in your marketing.
To help you out with that particular problem, we wrote an article about properly getting to know your students – you can read it afterwards here.
Remember, you have an international audience with a variety of cultural backgrounds, so approaching holidays might be especially tricky for you. We hope you’ll find this article useful and if you feel like, you can use the decision tree we created for you to simplify the process.
Download a printable version of the holiday decision tree here:
Shortcuts:
How to plan a successful marketing campaign that includes a variety of holidays
Holidays and festivities are special events both for a society as a whole and for particular groups within it. They are times of breaking the routine and allowing yourself to rest from everyday chores. They’re crucial for bonding with members of one’s community, sometimes by spiritual practices and sometimes just by traditional or cultural ones.
We all know tons of various holidays and we celebrate them in diverse ways – no wonder that as a language school owner you feel like including the holidays that you celebrate or that are somehow relevant to your culture, in the communication with your students and prospective clients.
We’re here to suggest to you some ways to approach holidays and celebrations in your marketing endeavors so that you’ll always be respectful and not offensive to certain groups of people, even if just by accident and out of unawareness of some issues.
Just for you to note, in this article, we decide to make a classification of holidays by dividing them into three categories: religious, cultural and pop-cultural. Important to acknowledge – it’s impossible to draw a firm line between those types– it all depends on particular norms and values in a specific society or community. Sometimes a holiday falls under all of the categories or just some of them but we’re not here to ponder on it on a theoretical level – we’re here to sensitize you to some issues that you might have wondered about before. Actually, if you haven’t – we encourage you to do it now! 😉
Let’s delve into the world of celebrations, festivities and holiday!
Download a printable version of the holiday decision tree here:
The problem with using holidays when marketing to a specific culture or religious group
A lion's share of holidays and festivities has some religious background – it’s vital to be aware of that, even if you live in a very non-religious country. Your students might treat some holidays in a different way than you do and you should be prepared for some potential discussions if you decide to share some content about that particular holiday, especially if you do that without really thinking it through beforehand.
In the following parts of the article, we’ll do our best to explain how to approach holidays in a more conscious and informed way. We’ll go by the categories we presented at the beginning of the article and will focus on the characteristics of every each of them.
Religious holidays
Approaching holidays falling under this category shouldn’t be difficult if your school affiliates itself with a particular religion. So, if you’re wondering whether or not to include a predominantly religious holiday in your marketing, you should answer yourself a question:
are these religious values close to your school and is this religion somehow important to it?
If the answer is yes, no problem then, feel free to share content about that.
However, if you do not affiliate yourself with that religion and you still decide to share content about it – ask yourself why you’re doing it and what are your arguments to do so. Well, we’re not saying you can’t do it, we’re just trying to warn you that there might be some believers among your students who might feel that you’re using their religious holiday just to promote your business.
And, well, that’s not what we’ll applaud – we believe that marketing is about communication, honesty, openness, and creating connections, not taking cold and calculated actions.
Lastly, if a regarded holiday has religious roots but is celebrated by most of the society in a cultural or a pop-cultural way (like Christmas, for instance), then let’s go to further paragraphs – there is much more to dig out.
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Pop-cultural holidays
Some holidays, even if originating from religious rituals, are currently completely absorbed by pop culture and washed out of their initial religious meaning, especially in some societies. Christmas is a great example of such a holiday, and you could ask yourself why not play with the theme to cheer up yourself and your audience.
Well, even though some holidays are celebrated widely and enthusiastically, doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to acknowledge them in your marketing. There are several reasons for that, eg. they might be completely irrelevant to your students (for instance, if they originate from a culture of different than Christian background in the case of Christmas).
On the other hand, you might take an educational stand and simply keep posting about that holiday for sake of sharing cultural facts. But then, do you really have time and energy for it? The answer is yours.
Most importantly, however, you have to always make sure that you don’t offend anyone – there’s no reason for you to do that, especially since it’s pretty easy to avoid. Just try to be empathetic and understanding, or simply google this phrase: “is X an offensive holiday”. Keep on digging until you have your own, firm opinion.
Download a printable version of the holiday decision tree here:
Cultural holidays
This category of holidays is the most tricky in our opinion when it comes to your marketing.
To give you a good example of cultural holidays, let’s take the national ones which definitely fall under this category. They’re often linked with historical events (like independence days) or the historical context of the country (like colonialism). Historical processes and events are often about domination of one group over another (usually linked with violence, of course), and modern countries are shaped by nationalism which is exclusionary by definition.
This heritage is still visible in current societies – eg. by celebrating particular holidays nationwide. A good example is Thanksgiving in the USA:
“When I was a child, Thanksgiving was simple. It was about turkey and dressing, love and laughter, a time for the family to gather around a feast and be thankful for the year that had passed and be hopeful for the year to come. […] What is widely viewed as the first Thanksgiving was a three-day feast to which the Pilgrims had invited the local Wampanoag people as a celebration of the harvest.”
www.nytimes.com/2019/11/27/opinion/thanksgiving-history.html
However, its current understanding changes due to Indigenous activists’ critic and the day is gradually being reclaimed by the Native Americans living within the territories of the USA as the National Day of Mourning.
Hence, acknowledging Thanksgiving in your marketing might seem, on one hand, as simply acknowledging a tradition of families gathering and being thankful. In fact - it’s also, in a way, acknowledging existing postcolonial inequalities and injustice, and – sorry to say, celebrating genocide which should be absolutely unacceptable nowadays if we want to push our communities towards a world that’s a better place to live for all.
Another example could be the Dutch Sinterklaas (Santa Claus) celebration and the infamous Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) tradition linked with it. Long story short, Black Petes are supposed to be Santa’s playful servants but actually, it’s a racist custom of white people wearing blackface, Afro wigs, and behaving in a caricatural way. As a consequence, it’s interpreted as mocking Black people and as an emanation of colonialism, whose objective was, among others, to justify the inferiority of the colonized peoples. Colonialism still has its consequences, of course – as racial injustice, for instance, and we see absolutely no reason to reinforce it by some “tradition”.
By giving the above examples we want to warn you– think twice before you post anything about a particular holiday. By acknowledging it, you sign up under the values it conveys, which might not necessarily be positive. It’s not only about your brand’s image. You run a language school which is a culturally relevant place that is supposed to reinforce community building. It’s up to you then, which parts of the culture you choose to identify with and advocate for.
Conclusion: The importance of cultural sensitivity in marketing campaigns
Holidays and celebrating them is a complex part of the culture and what’s important for you to take out of our article is higher sensitivity and a higher sense of responsibility for your marketing actions.
Remember: be informed and keep educating yourself about certain holidays (even if you’ve known them forever because they’re part of your culture) – listen to others and use empathy. If someone says some actions are hurtful for them, there’s no reason not to believe in that.
Sure, you can take “risky” decisions but you have to be able to present arguments for your actions (eg. justifying why you choose to celebrate a holiday that is criticized by others). Also, be prepared for that criticism, and please, don’t get into defensive mode on your social media. Always take a deep breath, step back if needed and be ready to change your mind.
In the end, it’s the community that you help create that matters. And communities are for supporting each other, creating space for learning and simply, being together – both in festive and ordinary times.
PS. We’d also like you to remember that you can’t make everyone happy 🤷♀️ but you most certainly can try and not shoot yourself in the foot 😉
Not sure how to approach holidays in your own marketing? We’re happy to help:
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About the author
Hi! I’m Natalia Styrnol, a sociology graduate and a young social researcher interested especially in migration studies, trying to incorporate a critical and feminist perspective in all the research I do. Here at ELC, I’m Karolina’s right-hand (operations manager), an executive manager of her too many ideas and, from time to time, a copywriter.
