Startups try to make smart bets with marketing budgets ahead of a potentially volatile summer

While summer might be a slower season, it’s an important time for brands and retailers to ensure they’ve still got customers’ attention ahead of bigger sales periods like the back-to-school season and Black Friday. And this summer, it’s an especially critical time for companies to fine-tune their strategies while grappling with declining consumer confidence.

Target, following a dismal earnings report, announced that it will release over 10,000 new products between now and August. The big-box retailer is also trying to generate foot traffic by hosting “Hello Summer Saturday” events throughout June. Rick Gomez, the evp and chief commercial officer at Target, said during an earnings call on May 21 that the retailer was focused on “placing smart bets in key areas, focused on the latest styles, trends and cultural moments.”

Startups, too are focused on placing smart bets. But their budgets are tighter. In turn, marketers at companies like Ollie, Olipop and Faherty told Modern Retail that they are kicking off their seasonal marketing campaigns with conservative budgets in mind. Some of them are trying to optimize their marketing efforts by bringing back tried-and-true products they know will resonate with their audience. Brand collabs also remain popular, low-lift way to reach new audiences.

Ollie, which sells fresh dog food, is one such brand that is refreshing its summer marketing with a returning product. The company is teaming up with ice cream brand Van Leeuwen to bring back a limited-edition peanut butter and banana frozen dog treat that the two companies released last summer.

Ollie’s brand director, Nicole Sumner, told Modern Retail that the company’s focus on ROI-driven marketing means making the most out of every product release or new campaign. Last summer, when Ollie teamed up with Van Leeuwen, it was the company’s first collaboration with a human food brand and a way to test the waters. 

Last summer, the Van Leeuwen collaboration turned out to be Ollie’s most popular add-on item of the season. “We sold out of it and then got more inventory back in to extend the offer through the summer,” Sumner said.  It helped drive a lot of new Ollie subscriptions throughout its run, with the company using the product as a gift-with-purchase offer for new customers.

Ollie likes to find scrappy ways to raise brand awareness, Sumner explained. During the 2024 Super Bowl, for example, Ollie ran the “Supper Bowl Extravaganza,” a social media campaign centered around a dog adoption drive with a product giveaway component. This allowed Ollie to take advantage of Super Bowl chatter without shelling out seven figures for an official ad during the big game.

This summer, it helped that the R&D and packaging design was already done from the first run of the Van Leeuwen collab, Sumner explained. “So when we were thinking about what we could do this year, we thought it would be fun to bring the dog ice cream back again,” she said. 

Last time around, the collaboration also received media coverage and social media mentions. The goal is to not only sell through the ice cream, but to expand brand awareness outside of Ollie’s own channels. Like last year, the treat is now available on Ollie’s website, at Van Leeuwen shops and at Petco stores nationwide.

For the returning drop, she said the Ollie team’s lift is focused on refreshing the messaging. 

“We did not want to fully rinse and repeat it, so we did another photoshoot and made a lot of fun, fresh social content,” Sumner said. This year, she said, “We’ll be doing some cool giveaways related to the product.” 

Similarly, this month, prebiotic soda brand Olipop is kicking off a campaign to promote the return of its orange cream soda by popular demand. The company says the flavor was a fan favorite when it was first released as a limited-edition SKU in 2021. 

“The flavor was launched as an LTO during Covid and became popular with customers,” Steven Vigilante, director of strategic partnerships at Olipop, told Modern Retail. However, it was discontinued as the ingredients needed to make it temporarily became more expensive. Now, with the relaunch, orange cream will become part of Olipop’s permanent lineup. 

To support the relaunch, Olipop kicked off the campaign with a vintage soda shop-inspired drive-thru in Los Angeles. Vigilante explained that, over the years, the company has focused on profitability and efficiency. It’s now testing community-driven events to connect with Olipop fans. 

Vigilante said the type of brand awareness stunts in the current economic climate is relative to each brand’s budget. “We have to compete not only with big brands with massive budgets, but also with brands in our category that spend a lot more frivolously than we do,” Vigilante said.

The soda drive-thru idea “was born out of the dirty soda craze,” Vigilante explained. The trend has increased in popularity in the last few years, thanks in part to reality hit show “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” which made the drive-thru soda shop Swig go viral. 

To keep costs down, Olipop opted to rent a truck, rather than building out its own custom pop-up space The truck popped up on May 12 in Los Angeles, where the brand distributed free dirty soda mocktails. Reality star Scott Disick stopped by the Olipop drive-thru to create his own “Dirty Disick” soda. A virtual version of the drive-thru was available for national customers on Olipop’s website, along with merch giveaways. 

With the second season of the show kicking off this month, Vigilante said he expects dirty soda concoctions to be in the conversation again this summer. And Olipop wants to be a bigger part of that conversation, both online and offline. 

“There is a beauty in bringing internet-famous trends to life in person,” he said. “People are already making these sodas at home, so having them come out and try them in real life is a content forum for us.”

Summer is a major season for beverage marketing, in general, making it a popular space for collaborations. Clothing brand Faherty, known for its outdoor and beach-friendly styles, is teaming up with beer maker Montauk Brewing Company on a limited-edition summer brew inspired by Faherty’s new coastal-inspired summer collection. The beer launches in June and will be exclusively served at Faherty’s stores this summer, including its Montauk and Hamptons locations.

Abby Morgan, evp of marketing at Faherty, said the brand reached out to the brewery to create a branded beer that reflects Faherty’s Montauk presence. Morgan said the beer also helps Faherty tap into the local surf culture with a brand that’s already a local favorite. 

“It’s a creative yet easy-to-execute activation that brings people together,” Morgan said. “[And] it strengthens our connection with the people who inspire our brand.” 

As brands wonder whether economic conditions will worsen in the back-half of the year, many of these marketers Modern Retail spoke with are also looking at these activations to gauge what they may want to invest in, in the rest of the year. It’s also a way to gauge how consumer sentiment may be changing, especially for brands that are re-releasing products.

Vigilante said Olipop’s Los Angeles drive-thru was a pilot test for the brand to gauge whether a national tour is scalable. It was also a way to create social media content with creators through relatively low-lift means. Still, Vigilante said the effort that goes into tactics like physical pop-ups largely depends on what the brand is able to support, both financially and in terms of the team’s bandwidth. 

Ollie’s Sumner, meanwhile, said the upside of bringing back a product and its accompanying marketing rollout is that the company has goals and comps in place. “We already have a pretty good baseline of metrics from last year,” she said. “That made goal setting a little bit easier this time.”