One of the easiest mistakes to make in a seasonal business is to confuse the moment demand peaks with the moment demand begins.
I learned that most clearly at HuntWise. On paper, it looked simple. Hunting season had obvious spikes. Traffic rose. Interest rose. Revenue mattered most in a relatively narrow window. So the temptation was always there to say, let's push hardest when people are buying. Let's save budget for when intent is obvious. Let's wait until the wave is right in front of us.
That sounds disciplined. It even sounds data-driven.
It is usually late.
Surfing is the closest metaphor I know for this. If you wait to start swimming until the wave is already on top of you, you are not riding it. You are reacting to it. By then, you are scrambling, off balance, and hoping momentum bails you out. The people who ride well start earlier. They position themselves before the wave crests. They do work that looks premature to people standing on shore.
Seasonal marketing works the same way.
I did not have all the academic language for this when I first lived it. I just knew there were years when the pressure inside a seasonal business felt artificial, almost self-inflicted. The team would feel behind, creative would feel rushed, media would get more tactical, and leadership would start asking performance marketing to do a job that brand, awareness, merchandising, and planning should have started solving weeks earlier. Over time, and across more than one business, I came to a much simpler conclusion: in seasonal categories, the sale often happens at the peak, but the decision path starts well before it.
The research lines up with that. A classic Journal of Marketing Research paper argued that "virtually every product is seasonal" in some form, and that seasonality is not just a reporting artifact but something that should shape strategic timing decisions themselves. In other words, seasonality is not a footnote to demand. It is part of how demand forms.
That matters because most operators still budget as if the calendar spike is the whole story. It is not. The visible spike is usually just the most measurable part.
Take shopping behavior. Google reported that holiday shopping has stretched earlier across several months, with 31% of U.S. holiday shoppers saying they had already started by June 2021, and 40% saying the holiday experience made them consider shopping much earlier for other milestones as well. In the same research, 43% of U.S. holiday shoppers who used Google said they did so for gift ideas, and 64% said they used it for discovery and inspiration. That is the key point. By the time the transaction is happening, many consumers have already been learning, comparing, imagining, and narrowing choices for a while.
NRF shows the same pattern in other seasonal moments. For the winter holidays, roughly two out of five shoppers now start browsing and buying before November. For back-to-school, 26% of shoppers had already started by early June in 2025, up from 17% in 2019. That is not a marginal shift. That is the front edge of the season moving earlier than many brands' media calendars.
This is where a lot of seasonal brands get fooled by last-click logic. They see conversions stack up in the peak window and assume the peak window did all the work. But marketing science has been warning against that simplification for a long time. A major meta-analysis of 918 marketing communication carryover estimates found that advertising effects do not vanish when the campaign ends. The median 90% duration interval was about 3.4 months for mass media advertising and 2 months for targeted advertising. That means a meaningful share of what converts in-season is often being shaped months before the in-season dashboard lights up.
Put more plainly, marketing has memory.
That idea should matter a lot more to seasonal operators than it usually does. If advertising works with lag, then the right question is not "When do sales happen?" It is "When do we need to be remembered by the time sales happen?" That is a very different calendar.
Nielsen's work reinforces this. Their experience base shows that, on average, a 1-point gain in brand metrics like awareness and consideration drives a 1% increase in sales. They also found a strong correlation, 0.73, between upper-funnel brand metrics and marketing efficiency across markets in one study. So awareness is not the fluffy thing you do when times are good. It can make the lower funnel work better when the hard season arrives.
That maps almost perfectly to what I felt in practice at HuntWise. When we were early, the season felt like leverage. When we were late, the season felt like pressure. Same audience. Same broad calendar. Completely different operating experience.
And there is a second mistake seasonal brands make. They think they can go quiet in the off months and simply "turn it on" when the market wakes up. Sometimes you can get away with that for a short stretch. Usually not for long. Kantar's analysis of brands that went dark found deterioration in communication awareness and other brand health measures after six months without TV advertising, with bigger declines for brands that did not shift budget into other channels. Their conclusion is intuitive: once awareness decays, recovery takes more investment than people expect.
Again, this feels very familiar operationally. You save money by waiting, then spend more later trying to regain the ground you thought you preserved.
The stronger model is not "brand or performance." It is sequencing. Binet and Field's effectiveness work, summarized by the IPA and Thinkbox, found that long-term investment in advertising delivers roughly double the profit of a short-term approach, and that the best results tend to come from balancing brand building and activation, with the famous sweet spot around 60:40. They also found that share of voice above share of market, what the industry calls ESOV, has historically been linked with market share growth. The practical lesson is not that every seasonal business should blindly adopt a 60:40 split. It is that waiting until the season to behave like a full-funnel marketer is usually too late.
You can see this play out in today's retail calendar too. NIQ reported that in 2025, Black Friday demand started lifting in the first half of November, not just during the old one-week window, and that e-commerce revenue during Black Friday week surged 166% versus an average week. Their implication was direct: brands need to re-sequence calendars earlier, with demand building beginning two to three weeks sooner. Even the "peak" is no longer a single event. It is an arc.
That is why I think the surfing metaphor holds up better than most business metaphors. Good surfers do not create the wave. They study it, respect its timing, and position themselves early enough to use its energy. Seasonal operators do the same. You cannot manufacture the calendar. You cannot bully demand into existing before people care. But you can be in the right place before attention turns into action.
For me, the operating takeaway is simple.
In seasonal businesses, the season starts before the spreadsheet says it starts.
It starts when curiosity rises. It starts when comparison begins. It starts when customers begin to imagine themselves in the moment your product serves. It starts when awareness can still be built cheaply, before everyone else piles into the auction.
By the time revenue peaks, the smartest work should already be underway.
That does not mean spending recklessly year-round. It means understanding that pre-season brand awareness is not wasted spend. It is positioning. It is swimming out. It is getting your board under you while the water is still manageable.
I have seen this most clearly in hunting, but the pattern is bigger than one category. It shows up in holidays, back-to-school, weather-driven businesses, and any business where demand compresses into windows that matter disproportionately. The brands that win are not always the ones with the biggest budgets at the peak. Often they are the ones who had the humility to start earlier, while the water still looked calm.
That is the part seasonal businesses miss.