Valentine’s Day is upon us and the symbols of love are flying off the shelves. Sales of flowers – particularly roses – hit yearly, one-day sales highs during this time of the year. According to the Society of American Florists, 250 million roses are purchased for Valentine’s Day and 65 percent are red roses. Don’t forget about chocolate sales. According to the National Confectioners Association, Americans consume about 58 million pounds of chocolate on Valentine’s Day. What about eating out? Valentine’s Day is the second busiest day for restaurants (Mother’s Day gets the nod as number one).

Are you in awe of the marketing of love? How did we get to the point where we are buying in excessive on romance? No one is for sure, but somewhere along the line, someone turned a day to honor a martyred saint into a day of gift buying for the significant other in your life.

There is a marketing lesson to learn during Valentine’s Day. First, it is a day built upon emotion, and emotion sells very well. Any time you can connect your brand to a deep emotion, you will have the attention of your audience. Marketing’s first job is to get the attention of the consumer. Here is a Duracell ad from a few years ago. Watch it and tell me you don’t feel something deep inside by the end of the video. Feelings always trump facts in marketing. If you just watched this video to the end, you proved my point. You won’t find any facts about the battery in this video. Nowhere does this ad talk about how long it lasts or any other qualities of the product you would expect from a battery manufacturer. Here’s my point: you would not have watched a 90-second video that stated facts. However, you just watched a 90-second video that told an emotional story. Emotion wins the marketing game.

The second marketing lesson from Valentine’s Day is the power of a hard deadline. Think about this: what does it mean if you take a pass on buying a Valentine’s Day gift of some sort for your special someone? It means you are a slug! More than saying "I care about you” by buying a gift, you are making a louder statement – "I don’t care about you” – by not making the purchase. If you think you can make it up to your loved one by buying roses the day after Valentine’s Day, think again! Anytime you have a hard deadline you have a perfect marketing opportunity. People do not care what it costs to make their "love” purchases, they just don’t want to miss the deadline. There is a big dose of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) involved – or maybe better stated, FOLA (Fear of Losing All). If you can work a hard deadline into your marketing, where the winners are defined by their purchase before the deadline and the losers are left with regrets, the better your brand will sell.

Valentine’s Day has taught us how to market on emotion and a hard deadline. Build these two aspects into your marketing strategies and see the difference it makes. Love sells!