By Samuel Marriott-Dowding
January is often treated like an intermission for hospitality.
The Christmas decorations come down, the footfall drops, the marketing budgets tighten; and somewhere between the hangover of December and the hope of Spring, many hospitality brands decide to go quiet.
On paper, it feels sensible. Why spend when customers aren’t?
Yet, silence isn’t neutral. It has a cost – and for hospitality businesses, that cost is brand equity.
In January 2026, we’re seeing venues across the North East grappling with the same challenge: cautious consumers, rising costs, and an increasingly competitive landscape. The instinctive response is to pull back on visibility, wait it out, and hope February brings relief. In reality, what happens instead is erosion.
When a brand goes quiet, it doesn’t disappear – it fades. A process far more dangerous than struggling.
Hospitality doesn’t just compete on menus or rooms or pricing. It competes on memory, relevance and emotional connection. If your venue isn’t present in the conversation – in the media, in storytelling, in culture – it’s quietly being replaced by something else. A new opening, a more dynamic brand, or a business willing to keep talking when others retreat.
This is where many people confuse PR with promotion.
Public relations isn’t about shouting offers into the void. It’s about shaping perception when attention is scarce. January, in fact, is one of the most strategically valuable months to invest in PR – precisely because fewer businesses are doing it. Journalists are still commissioning stories, audiences are still consuming content, but the noise is lower, which means the impact is higher.
The most resilient hospitality brands use January to reinforce who they are. They tell stories about people, provenance, purpose and place. They put founders, chefs and general managers forward as voices of their sector. They remind customers why they matter – long before asking them to book.
At MC PR, we often describe this as reputation maintenance. Just as a venue wouldn’t close its doors for a month and expect loyal customers to return unchanged, it shouldn’t close its voice either. Visibility is cumulative, trust is built in layers, and silence strips those layers away.
There’s also a longer-term risk at play, for when hospitality brands disappear in quieter months, they make it harder to recover momentum later. Spring campaigns have less traction, and Summer launches feel rushed. The narrative has to be rebuilt from scratch – usually at greater cost and under greater pressure.
The truth is, PR during difficult periods isn’t about spending more, it’s about spending smarter. It’s about choosing presence over panic, narrative over noise, and consistency over reaction.
January doesn’t reward the loudest brands, it rewards the most considered ones.
As in hospitality, silence doesn’t save money; it slowly spends everything you’ve already built.
Email me at sam@marriottcommunications to find out more.