The death of the launch.

§I A launch is a press event dressed as a brand event.

The launch, as a marketing unit, was invented by category trade press and distribution teams. It is a mechanic for moving a case of product through the trade calendar. It is not, in itself, a brand event. Every brand-side team calls it one, which is why so many brand launches produce such thin brand information.

We have been quietly moving clients away from the launch as a primary brand rhythm for about three years. What we move them to instead is seasons. A season is a period of coherent brand work with a beginning, a middle, and an end, where the product is one element of the season, not the occasion of the season. Seasons are what magazines have; launches are what press releases have. The better brands quietly operate on seasons.

§II Seasons produce compound material.

The useful property of a season, compared to a launch, is that it produces compounding material. A launch peaks in its first week and decays. A season, run correctly, contains perhaps four or five discrete brand moments across ten to twelve weeks, each of which contributes to a single coherent thesis, each of which is still usable twelve months later.

The feed, by design, favours compounding material over one-shot material. A season gives the algorithm five or six anchor moments to keep indexing against the brand's name; a launch gives it one, already fading, by week two. Brands that have switched to seasons see, on average in our client base, a 1.7 to 2.2 times improvement in organic impressions-per-dollar across twelve months, with no change in content spend.

The feed forgets launches inside a week. It remembers seasons for a year. If you can choose, you choose seasons. — Internal note, social practice, Q3 2024

§III How to actually move.

The practical migration is simple and uncomfortable. The calendar stops being structured around six launches a year and starts being structured around three seasons of roughly twelve weeks each. The brand team stops briefing content around a hero product and starts briefing it around a season thesis that the product embodies. The press releases stop being sent.

The discomfort is in the trade relationships. Buyers still want a trade window; retailers still want a promotional calendar. The answer is not to remove either; it is to de-couple them from the brand calendar. The trade team runs the launch calendar, quietly, as a trade discipline. The brand team runs seasons, loudly, as the brand's year. The two sets of work cooperate; they are not the same work.

Every client we have talked through this migration has resisted at first and is grateful three seasons in. The result is a brand with a louder, longer, and more coherent public rhythm, powered by the same content budget the launches used to consume in week-one bursts.