Today is National Cheese Pizza Day. Each year, on September 5, the most basic of pizzas is celebrated with a day in its honor. I would suspect that, unless you work in the marketing of pizza, you had no idea today was a special day. You have probably never heard of National Cheese Pizza Day. Why do we remember some special days, but not this one? There are probably several reasons for this, but I want to focus on two: it has not been promoted enough for you to hear about it and there is an oversaturation of special pizza days.

If you are in charge of marketing for your company, you know that the first step in promoting your brand is to get the word out into the streets. Name recognition of your brand (or event) is crucial to getting consumers to buy it. A lot of marketing goes into brand awareness. This is a very simple concept: if you don’t promote the awareness of the name of your brand – associating what it is and what it does for consumers - you stand little chance of selling anything.

However, awareness is not where marketing stops. More than promoting the name, marketing is tasked with setting the brand apart from the competition as well. This is where first-time sales marketing takes place. Wherever you can, you need to strategize to use marketing to set your brand up to stand above all others. In the case of a special day, you need to own the day or you risk confusing your target market. Let me give you an example. We have a handful of special days we celebrate annually. Each one is unique from the others. When I talk about St. Patrick’s Day, you would not get it confused with Independence Day on July 4 or Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday in November. That is because they have a look and feel that is unique to each special day. We even eat different food on those days because the "brand” of those days has been engrained in us to think of them uniquely, not mixed with each other. So we would think it odd to put green food coloring in a drink on Thanksgiving and horribly distasteful to serve pumpkin pie at a July 4th cookout.

Here is where we can learn a marketing lesson on a day dedicated to cheese pizza. There are too many other "pizza” days to make National Cheese Pizza Day stand out to us. There is a National Pepperoni Pizza Day on September 20. There is a National Pizza Day on February 9. However, the reason this day just doesn’t stand out is it is too basic. If you are going to celebrate a product, throw the works at it. In other words, make your brand supreme and promote it. Stripped-down brands rarely sell well. Keep that in mind as you implement your marketing strategies.