Are you experiencing the doldrums of February? Does it feel like the really good winter holidays are past us and now all we have to look forward to is the slow thaw of a long, icy season? We are in the last third of winter. We are still four weeks and one day away from the Spring Equinox. This is the part of the year where gloominess can overtake the most optimistic of us.

Does mood impact sales? Yes, it does! That’s why it is so important for your marketing to anticipate the mood of the market in any promotional campaigns you might do. In your planning, you need to take a look at the calendar and figure out when the best time is to approach your target market. When would that be? It depends upon what you are selling – or a better way of saying it is what are you doing for your target market? Are you relieving their pain or are you feeding their happiness? When you consider what customers need from you, they are typically trying to do one or the other.

Let me give you an example. On my way home today, I need to stop and do a couple of things. I am going to fill the tank of my automobile up with fuel. That is relieving my pain, because if I ignore it, I will run out of gas and end up walking. I am avoiding pain by fueling my car. Tonight, I am also stopping into a local pizza restaurant to get something to eat. That is making me happy because I love pizza. You might say that the pizza is fuel for my body and if I don’t eat, I will also suffer pain. Yes, but I am not really thinking about starvation when I buy the pizza, I just want to eat something that I like – that makes me happy.

So there are two general promotional paths you can use to market to someone’s mood.  Marketing to avoid pain is promoted by the emotion of fear. If you don’t use this product or service, something bad will happen to you (my accountant comes to mind). If you are promoting your brand as a fix to a problem, you need to figure out when your target market’s pain is pressing in on them. February might be a good time for you. However, if you are marketing to the emotion of happiness, you would do well to wait until the mood of your target market is better than it is now. Here is a very important axiom of this kind of marketing: happy people buy things and sad people don’t. Did you read earlier that the official start of spring is just four weeks away? What that means is there will be more sunshine each day. Flowers will start to bloom. Trees will begin to bud and birds will sing. That will brighten people’s moods and they will be more open to your marketing than they are in the blahs of February.

What are you selling? How are you marketing it? Make sure you are taking into account the time of the year and the mood of your market. It really makes a difference.