Every year, around November, in every PR company and marketing department in the UK, someone says, “I have a great idea. Let’s publish a feature called New Year, New You.”
It is a great idea…the same great idea thought of by almost everyone else.
Google shows me that there are 31,000 results for the exact match phrase “new year new you” dated between the beginning of November 2015 and the end of January 2016.
As I write this, there are more than 46,000 search results for the phrase between 1 November 2016 and 21 December.
Here’s just a small selection of the most recent New Year New You stories
- New year, new you? Only if you make it happen
- New year, new you deals at Tesco
- New year, new you recipes from Del Monte
Nowhere is this repetition more evident than on Huffington Post, where multiple articles compete with variants on the same headline.
- In Why we’re reclaiming new year new you, Executive Editor Poorna Bell says, “Although for the last two years we’ve run a campaign called Say No To January that was a pushback against diet, detox and living like a pod person for four weeks, we want to embrace the idea of change but promote it in a sustainable way.”
- In New year, new you (and other clichés), in January 2016, Ashley James said, “This new year, I’m not going to set myself up for disappointment by making the usual unattainable resolutions based on insecurities.”
- Over the years, there have been many NYNY posts on HuffPo by the likes of Mark Foster, Amanda Fulton, Mary McGill and Amanda Byrom.
Do we all want to be new in the new year?
Marketing people like milestones. Easter, Christmas, Thanksgiving, St George’s Day, St Patrick’s Day, Pancake Day, National Talk Like A Wurzel Day…
Naturally, the new year is synonymous with the sentiment of getting rid of the old and moving on to better and more aspirational things.
For content marketing people, it’s too easy to just fall in the ‘new year, new you’ rut. Here’s a new year’s resolution for you – this year, before you get to your autumn planning meetings, try to think of something different.
We need a new headline for new year stories.
I’ll leave you with the knowledge that one of the top search results for the phrase new year new you is this page from Pintereset, entitled 100+ ideas about new year new you on Pinterest.
Steve (RIP) was Services Director for Vertical Leap. He started professional life as a magazine journalist, working on music magazines and women's titles before becoming a web editor in 1997, then joining MSN to work purely in online publishing. Since 1999 he has worked for and consulted to a broad range of businesses about their digital marketing.
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