Tradition. In August 2025 we published a similar piece, and many of you arrived — more than a summer article usually gets, a sign the material interests beyond seasonal limits.
We do it again, but differently. Shorter. Sharper. A non-hagiographic sequel — the summer of 2026, in Italy, is a strange season: excessive heat, post-Easter market still soft, nervous wait for the September return. The brand that goes through it well comes out stronger. The one that goes through it badly comes out confused.
The three promised lists, in order.
The ten mistakes we see every year
In quick sequence, with minimal annotation.
1. The autoresponder that closes everything. "I'll be back in office on September 1. For urgencies, contact [colleague]." Period. No brand, no personality, no useful alternative. Eight words of vacuum while your customer is writing because they need help now.
2. The "discover September's news" in the autoresponder. The idea that your vacation is an occasion to do promotion. It's jarring. Vacation is a stop, not a marketing trigger.
3. The silent socials for four weeks. A brand that disappears in August and reappears September 1 makes noise. In the sense: the audience notices the absence. Not always positively.
4. The socials full of "happy holidays!" fake-enthusiastic. Opposite variant. Posts of sun, sea, umbrellas, essentially identical between competitors. Noise without signal.
5. The newsletter that skips August and returns with an "energetic September". If your newsletter loses a week in August, nothing happens. If it loses four, users forget about it. Frequency is a pact.
6. The autoresponder that reveals too much. "I'm on vacation in [Exotic Location], I don't read emails." For a client dealing with a real crisis, it's gas on the fire.
7. The empty blog from mid-July. Typical mistake of companies that publish "when inspiration arrives". Summer is perfect to schedule in advance, not to stop.
8. The homepage that doesn't update the summer message. The site that in mid-August still shows the May promotion. Small, but it's the sign that nobody really looks at the site.
9. The return newsletter titled "We're back!". Serious variant: the newsletter that on September 1 tells that you're back, rather than what you did or what's changing. Whoever reads you didn't look for you: they opened you out of habit.
10. The automatic replies with grammar errors. They appear everywhere. They are the saddest case of all: written hastily in July, applied to everything, forgotten.
The five brilliant ideas (that really work)
1. The "real August" newsletter. A special edition that doesn't talk about your brand, but about a collateral topic your audience loves: five books, three podcasts, ten places to walk to in your region. It's a gift, not a marketing action. And precisely for that, it works really well.
2. The founder's social. Photos of the founder doing normal things — an event, a market, a walk, a conversation. No promotion. It's a summer seen through the founder's eye. It creates a level of intimacy no paid campaign can buy.
3. The declared pause. A post at the top of the site or a pin on socials: "This summer we stop from August 5 to 25. We'll be back on the 26th with [thing]". It's honest. It's useful. It's almost always more appreciated than fake "keep going".
4. The summer backstage. Photos of who works in July when many are already gone. Not vindication, story. Companies made of people have people who work in summer, and telling them values them.
5. The pillar content of mid-August. What few do. Publish a serious and long article on Ferragosto (mid-August holiday). Little noise around = very little competition, and the readers who are there are disproportionately active (and bored). It's one of the best times of the year for impact.
The Italian case: Crodino
Just one case. Deliberately.
Crodino is one of the few Italian brands that has transformed summer into product identity. Not a "summer launch" that repeats. A structural seasonality that becomes character. Crodino is the aperitif you realize you want to drink when the heat arrives. For ten, eleven months of the year it's a background presence. In June-July-August it returns to the foreground, with a coherent language (the yellow, the glass, the solitary or convivial aperitif), and then returns to rest.
They don't do a "summer campaign". They do their job, always, and summer amplifies it.
It's the most important lesson of the piece. A brand on holiday isn't a brand that changes tone for summer. It's a brand that, in summer, shows the most amplified version of itself. If you don't have a version of yourself that amplifies naturally in August, the problem isn't the July editorial plan. It's the brand upstream.
Monday, July 6 we enter the full summer season with a tactical piece: 5 AI experiments you can launch in a week (even from under the umbrella). Quick pilots, fast ROI, no enterprise budget.
Happy holidays to those who leave. Good work to those who stay — here we're still writing.
Want a brand that works even when you're not thinking about it? We build it together on substantial branding projects. Let's talk — even in July.