4 Tips To Help Your Brand’s Father’s Day Marketing Resonate With Gen Z

In a climate of different cultures and familial relationships, marketing for Father’s Day requires sensitivity and respect. Whether consumers have a strong relationship with the father figures in their lives, are estranged, or have experienced loss, it’s important to consider all possible options and remain empathetic when creating your Father’s Day marketing campaigns. 

In this blog, we’ll outline some of the ways your brand can reach young consumers who may find this a difficult time of year, and drive your brand affinity and loyalty as a result.

1. Start with empathy

Channelling empathy into a marketing strategy allows brands to build stronger emotional connections with their customers, and is vital when it comes to brand loyalty. Using empathy in your Father’s Day campaigns is key for reaching Gen Z audiences, who value compassionate and authentic interactions. This Father’s Day, many brands will be looking to roll out large scale, multi-channel campaigns, but it’s important to remember that the people on the other side are humans, with different experiences and feelings towards the day.

2. Your customers aren’t just a number

 A great example of empathetic marketing was last year’s Mother’s Day initiative by UK florists Bloom and Wild. The brand introduced a new policy for its customers which enabled them to choose whether or not they’d like to receive emails around Mother’s Day.

Bloom and Wild demonstrated that their customers weren’t just a number to them by personalising their communications, directly addressing emails to their customers. Equally, they humanised the email sign-off (in this case, it was from the Customer Experience Manager). Scripting an email in this way creates a powerful moment for customers, who are not a homogenous group but rather a collection of individuals with unique and differing experiences. As a result of the initiative, Bloom and Wild received widespread praise online – and rightly so!

However, it’s important to take note of your customer’s responses when crafting next year’s campaigns – if someone opts out of Father’s Day marketing this year, it’s highly unlikely that they’ll be opting in next year. Essentially, make sure that this sensitivity carries on across your campaigns. 

3. Celebrate Father’s Day inclusively

Father’s Day isn’t just a painful time for some because of parental loss. It can also be an emotional time for those who don’t have a relationship with their fathers/children, those who have lost children themselves, and those who can’t have children. Consider this when implementing your marketing campaigns and try to be as inclusive as possible with your advertising.

A successful campaign that touched on this was Ritz’s Crackers 2021 Mother’s and Father’s Day campaign. Ritz partnered with the National Foster Parent Association, running a social media campaign as well as a two-minute advert that showed a couple welcoming a fostered teenage boy to their home.

Ritz also went social with their campaign, creating fun and playful Instagram stickers for foster parents to use when sharing photos of their family. This was a clever play on the fact that in some US states, foster parents are unable to share the identity of their foster children on social media, so have to resort to editing photos of them with censor bars and icons.

4. Set your experience apart with discounts

To reach younger consumers who are feeling the pinch of the cost-of-living crisis more than ever, set your Father’s Day marketing apart by offering exclusive student discounts, freebies, and two-for-one offers. Remember that most young consumers will be shopping around for the best deals and this usually starts early, so kick off your marketing campaigns well ahead of time, and make sure your brand remembers to be empathetic. Don’t know where to start with student deals or want to level up your current offering? Get in touch with our sister company Student Beans – they’re the student discount experts!

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