Red alert! Valentine’s Day is just two days from the posting of this article. For those of you who have forgotten until now, you have limited time to make a purchase to show your affection for those you love, or you will be in very hot water! Whatever you had in mind: jewelry, cards, flowers, candy, reservations at a restaurant – drop everything and do it now before the February 14th deadline comes upon you or you will miss out!
What you just read is a marketing dream come true, where three components – a deadline, emotion and a legendary story – all converge to make Valentine’s Day the perfect marketing day of the year. Let’s take a look at each of these ingredients for this special day.
Deadline
Whenever there is a hard deadline, where it benefits the consumer if they make a purchase before that deadline, you have a marketing opportunity. Marketing works very well in these conditions because it is human nature to put off making a purchase until the last possible moment. Typically, in marketing, we create these deadlines. We might have a sale that ends on a specific day, where a discount is only valid if you purchase before the final bell. These are purely manufactured dates to put pressure on people to buy our brand now. However, a day like Valentine’s Day comes with its own built-in deadline. To give someone a Valentine’s gift on February 14 expresses your affection for them. To give them the same gift one day late sends the opposite expression. Deadlines are a marketer’s good friend.
Emotion
We make a lot of purchases on emotion. In fact, even the way we talk about products and services connotes emotion (ie. I love this restaurant, I hate that shirt). Love is a very powerful emotion that causes us to move past any reasonable explanation for what we are buying, except to express our love for another person. That is why love with a hard deadline will cause people to pay whatever price you set on an item that can be used to express their affection. Think about this: there is more chocolate sold for Valentine’s Day than any other event during the year (58 million pounds in the US at a price of $1.8 billion!) Sweethearts, the candy with infatuated messages, are just sold for Valentine’s Day. It is also the biggest day for the sale of roses (250 million sold at a price of $2.3 billion). When consumers buy on emotion, they will purchase just about anything if they can be convinced it will make them happy. Emotions are good for marketing.
Legendary story
St. Valentine’s Day is a day dedicated to love. Do you know why? Likely not, because the story of St. Valentine is a bit muddled. In fact, no one can really agree which guy with the surname “Valentine” was the true saint. There seem to be several candidates. One legend says that he was a bishop who secretly married young couples in Italy after the Roman Emperor Claudius II banned marriage. When he was caught, he was sentenced to be executed. It is said that he fell in love with the jailer’s daughter and on February 14, 270 AD, the day he was martyred, he sent her a note signed from your Valentine. This legend grew around the day of love several hundred years after St. Valentine was executed. People have been repeating it for centuries. Here is another marketing ploy that is perfected in Valentine’s Day. When you have a story associated with a special day, people are drawn to it simply because they want it to be true. Wait a minute! That story sounds like it was made up just to fit the occasion. Do you think that matters to people who are looking for a way to beat a deadline to purchase something to express their love? So the story is made up, it’s still a good story! And that is my final point about marketing, if you can associate your brand with a compelling story, do so. People love a legend.