September Changes More Than the Weather. It Changes What Research Finds, and What Marketing Should Say

Summer's over, and school's back in session. Aside from swapping shorts for jeans, something else shifts too: our routines, our priorities, our behavior.

It's easy to assume this only matters if you sell backpacks or notebooks. However, the end of summer matters well beyond the school-supply aisle because it's not really about school. It's about the fresh start. And that matters both for how we study behavior and for what we say to people once we understand it.

There's a name for some of this: the "fresh start effect."

In 2014, Hengchen Dai, Katherine L. Milkman, the Wharton professor behind How to Change, and Jason Riis published a study in Management Science examining what happens after a "temporal landmark": a birthday, New Year's, the start of a semester, even just a Monday. They found that people are meaningfully more likely to pursue goals following these moments.

A follow-up study dug into why. Landmarks that signal a new beginning help people draw a line between an old self and a new one. Old habits get filed under "before" instead of "still happening."

But psychology is only part of it. These moments also bring practical changes: different schedules, commutes, weather, demands on our time. Those shifts can change behavior whether or not someone is consciously chasing a fresh start.

We saw this in a study on coffee consumption habits. Just a few weeks of qualitative interviews caught behavior shifting in real time. Some people were moving toward hot coffee, drawn by the aroma and the signal that the house was waking up. Others were shifting toward cold brew because it was faster to grab on the way out the door.

Same seasonal transition. Same category. Two different behavioral responses and two different audiences to write for: a "kickstart your morning" message for one, and a "grab it and go" message for the other.

A survey fielded all at once could have missed the shift entirely, simply averaging two distinct moments and calling it one answer. A campaign that ignores the split makes the same mistake with a bigger budget behind it.

That's the kind of thing we think about before fieldwork starts. Field a survey in August and you're talking to someone still in summer mode. Ask the same questions three weeks later and you may be talking to someone actively reconsidering habits, more open to change and more willing to imagine behaving differently. A campaign runs on the same clock: launch while people are still in summer mode, and even a good message is answering a question no one's asking yet.

Timing isn't just a logistics detail. It's part of the instrument, and part of the media plan.

September is just one clear example. The holidays, New Year's, the start of a new quarter: more landmarks are right around the corner, each one worth watching on the media calendar as much as the fielding calendar.

That's easy to miss if you're only looking at what people buy, not when and why they became open to buying differently. Who you're talking to matters. So does when you're talking to them, and what you say once you know. Well-designed tracking programs (or Systems of Unified Learning, SOUL, as we think of them) can catch these transitions as they happen, so the insight and the message built on it both land while the moment is still open.

Take a back-to-school push: a "fresh start" message about reinvention might land hard the week students head back, while everyone's still reassessing routines. By mid-October, once the new schedule has settled in, a message about convenience is probably the more persuasive one. Same audience, same brand, different moment, different message.

Get the timing right, and the research we run and the campaign built on it start pulling in the same direction. So the next time there's a survey on the calendar or a campaign on the brief, it's worth asking when as much as what: are we still talking to the audience from August, or the one September just created?

 If you’re thinking about tracking and how to catch these shifts as they happen, Jason Brooks is the person to talk to. If you want to go deeper on the behavioral science behind why and when people change, talk to Judd Kessler, our behavioral economist.  Get in touch at info@bovitzinc.com.

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