Seasonal campaign system

The situation

The business ran several major campaign periods a year, each with a surge in demand, shifting priorities and a deadline that couldn't move. The subject changed every time, but the work underneath didn't: working out what different customers needed, deciding which messages and products should lead, producing the creative, building the on-site journey and keeping it accurate as availability and demand moved.

What was missing

Each campaign started from a largely blank page. The same questions were answered from scratch, under more pressure the closer the launch got, because what the last campaign had learned stayed with the people who ran it. Lessons weren't carried into the next one systematically, and approaches that had worked were recreated rather than reused.

There was no shared model of the customer either. Early planners researching options, people looking for inspiration, value-conscious customers and late arrivals needing a quick, confident decision all behaved differently. Yet creative, page structure, content, search and merchandising decisions were made separately, even though customers experienced them as one journey.

My role

I reviewed the campaign process as one customer and operational system rather than a sequence of design tasks. I mapped the behaviours that shaped when and how customers arrived, and connected each to what it required: the information customers needed, the routes they were likely to take, the creative needed at each stage, and the commercial and operational constraints. My role covered the structure of the campaign experience, the creative direction, the customer journeys and the reusable framework.

What got written down

A shared planning model that each campaign began from, plus which parts of a campaign could be reused, which needed to change, and how learning from one launch should feed into the next.

What changed

Campaigns stopped starting from a blank page. Planning was organised around established customer behaviours, campaign stages and delivery principles, which cut the reinvention and made creative, content, customer experience and commercial priorities easier to coordinate. The experience itself became more coherent: customers with a clear idea could move quickly, people still deciding could browse broader themes, and late arrivals got simpler, more direct routes.

The imagery side of the same seasonal pressure is what AI content transformation solved separately, and the behavioural groundwork underneath both is mapped in more depth in Customer journey diagnosis.