Meeting Consumers in their Mess
A Made by Mak Campaign Review
As the holiday season draws closer and closer, more of your favorite brands and businesses are delving into holiday campaigns. Covering every product in red and green bows, twinkly stars and snowflakes, and festive elements of the holiday season to push as many buyers as possible.
In the current marketing landscape, I find social media to be the easiest low-cost, low-risk, high yield for creating product and brand awareness, and even in creating effective purchase conversions through utilizing e-commerce. Yet, in a homepage filled with targeted ads and competing companies- how can your brand stand out in saturated spaces?
Meet Glossier
Glossier is a lifestyle and beauty brand that has found its strong suit in aesthetically pleasing cosmetic and merchandise products, encompassed by bright pink packaging, sleek minimalist marketing, and homing in on creating trend-appeal during the Tumblr era, in the years of 2014-2019.
Social media has played an interesting role in the cultural positioning of the company, having capitalized on the “Clean girl” movement in the beauty sphere to push products that were minimal and designed to enhance natural features for diverse cosmetic uses. From homing in on an identifiable visual brand and aesthetic consumer experiences- they created a brand that was designed to be capturable in user-generated content and authentically by customers. Their social media has always been visually curated and appealing to the eye, whilst also maintaining an element of reality and social listening that has stood the test of time.
Embracing chaos in your content
In their 2026 Holiday Campaign, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Meltdown,” Glossier has achieved holiday marketing that is authentic to their audience and a complete holiday slam dunk.
The brand has ditched all the perfect-natured elements of the holiday season’s pristine imagery often utilized in campaigns- perfect baked goods, professionally decorated Christmas trees, stylist and cozy curated outfits- in line for displaying the liveliness and chaotic nature of the busy holiday season. This direction is not only applicable to their young adult base of consumers and social media followers, and it creates not only a market distinction during this saturated time of year for the beauty and wellness scope- but a virtue signal of authenticity in their content.
As a brand focused on natural living, embracing what you have, and displaying your individuality through what you do- their 2026 Holiday campaign so far comes across as raw and real to the women who buy their makeup. Photos showing messy flat lays of merchandise and products, relatable memes about meltdowns, and romanticizing the disarray of this hectic time of buying, wrapping, planning, and gathering as another element of living beautifully.
The Audit is In!
Ultimately, your consumers do not want perfect posts and unrealistic production pieces that create holiday pressures. Curated wish lists scripted speak pieces pushing products, and down to the detail perfection posts are not always what resonate with your average Instagram user. Consumers want content that feels authentic to their daily lives, and this application in terms of holiday marketing creates a slam dunk for connectivity.
For social media users and followers of Glossier, romanticizing their messy lives and how products fit into them allows them to create content that serves not only their grid- but their customer base.