Year in Review: The Psychology Behind Viral Year-End Brand Campaigns
Why are Year in Review marketing campaigns so effective in driving engagement? How do brands captivate audiences with personalized insights?
It’s that time of the year again when brands release personalized year-end reviews or recaps of how we as individual users utilized their products or services in the last 12 months.
In this article, I share examples of 3 products that have done year-end marketing campaigns well. Additionally, I unpack 3 concepts on human psychology that I believe contribute to the effectiveness of these campaigns.
My brand campaign favorites
The following brand campaigns are so effective and make data analytics fun that I myself always look forward to December to see my year-end stats for my go-to lifestyle apps.
Spotify
Spotify is a no brainer and leads the charge here among all global brands. Their viral Spotify Wrapped campaign has been a worldwide hit ever since it launched in 2016, such that countless other brands have tried to replicate the same success.
The great thing about Spotify is that they’re never complacent, introducing new quirks to their campaign every year to always make it interesting for their listeners, like “My Sound Town” and the surprise top artist video message in 2023.
Goodreads
As a voracious reader, I also like Goodreads and their Year in Books, though they don’t really make an effort to update this and make it more exciting for their readers on an annual basis.
Even then, I still like seeing the total number of books I’ve read, the average number of pages I read, and a nice collage of all the books I’ve devoured in a given year.
Grab
When I was still based in Manila, Grab (the Uber equivalent in Southeast Asia) was another brand that did year-end campaigns well. They showed me the number of trips I’ve made, deliveries I’ve ordered, and yes, the amount of pesos I’ve spent on their app all year.
However, apart from these, they’ve also taken a more altruism-centered approach by sharing with me how many riders and small business owners have benefitted from my usage of their product, which was a nice touch that made me feel less terrible for my capitalistic consumption behaviors.
The psychology behind the virality
This is not an exhaustive list, but I believe these three key concepts play a huge role in the success of brands’ Year in Review marketing campaigns.
Nostalgia
Most of us are suckers for nostalgia, that sentimental feeling we get when looking back at past events and memories with fondness. The year-end recaps are, by design, meant to trigger this emotion because of how powerful it is in influencing human behavior.
There’s a reason why we purchase mementos from our favorite childhood shows or listen to rewatch podcasts or repost stories from 5 years back. These are tapping into our nostalgic tendencies. The same holds true for brands’ year-end campaigns.
Even if they are not necessarily digging up memories from years or decades ago, presenting how the last 12 months have shaped a person is still pretty darn powerful. I had one friend whose Spotify Wrapped showed him that he listened to Taylor’s Swift’s All Too Well (Ten-Minute Version) at a disproportionately high volume back in February, when he was going through a breakup, eliciting feelings of both grief and humor.
Vanity
Let’s face it. We like talking about ourselves. We like it when external parties shine a spotlight on us and tell us more about ourselves. We are vain people, and boy do brands know this about us. Vanity is another reason why year-end marketing campaigns work so well. Don’t feel guilty — it’s human nature!
Vanity is why we love answering BuzzFeed quizzes or participating in Instagram challenges to “share 6 random photos or you get 6 years of bad luck.” Unless you’re actually superstitious, you don’t really care about the bad luck; you just want to share 6 random photos of your life because again, it’s all about you.
On a related note, vanity is also closely tied to social currency. Apart from wanting to reveal more about ourselves, we also have this desire to compare ourselves with other people and demonstrate how our year-end “achievements” stack up against the broader population. It’s why we like sharing that we’re in the top 0.5% of an artist’s fans on Spotify, or how we’ve read over 50 books compared to our friend who read just one book a month.
Identity
Finally, year-end marketing campaigns are effective because they provide real data that allow you to learn more about yourself. Even if there’s the propensity to share the results with our network, I genuinely believe we like these year-end recaps because they in some way hold a mirror to our personalities and identities.
We know that we are evolving as humans, but we don’t really intentionally log data about our behaviors. The products and services we peruse do that for us. Through these campaigns, we are able to understand our changing interests and tastes, and how these correlate to our growth as humans.
Many people are naturally introspective, so these data points provide more tools for them to reflect on their lifestyles and if there’s anything they’d want to stop or start doing differently. For others where introspection doesn’t come to them by default, the year-end stats can serve as fuel to actually take a moment to contemplate the year that was.
Thanks for reading! I’m curious — what other brands have you encountered that you think are doing year-end campaigns really well? Are there other aspects of human psychology that you believe are contributing to their success?
