Fake Brand Holidays
Make A Day Of It
Who doesn’t love a holiday? Who wouldn’t want to dig into a syrupy short-stack on National Pancake Day (September 26th)? Or to finally bring some order to the chaos of your bathroom on National Clean Out Your Medicine Cabinet Day (3rd Friday in April)? And is there anything better than an intimate scrub on National Shower with a Friend Day (February 5th, the coldest part of winter)?
All of these holidays, and thousands more, are the inventions of brands seeking to find new ways to reach and excite their audiences. IHOP is responsible for the pancakes, DisposeRx for the cabinet-cleaning, and a conservation organization called New Wave Enviro for the shower suggestion.
Brand-led Consumerism
Brands have been leveraging established holidays and creating them from scratch since at least the nineteenth century. Black Friday grew from a tradition held by department stores to officially start the Christmas shopping season the day after Thanksgiving. Hallmark dreamed up National Friendship Day in 1919 as a way to increase card sales.
But the practice of inventing holidays has exploded in recent years. Brands noticed the uptick in sales that a “holiday” can provide, and ready-made content that’s perfect for social media. The National Day Calendar, an unofficial holiday authority, tracks thousands of days that brands have originated or appropriated. Valentine’s Day is a good example. Now, the calendar is so thick with occasions that SEO specialists have their pick.
Some fake holidays have become enormously popular and lucrative. Prime Day (July 15th) is a massive sales day created by Amazon that actually lasts for 48-72 hours. Even more successful is Singles Day (November 11th), which this year generated more than $38 billion in sales. Singles Day is a Chinese holiday created in the 1990s to celebrate bachelors, and later seized upon by Alibaba as a great way to encourage shopping. It’s now the largest offline and online shopping day in the world.
It isn’t just annual holidays, either - days of the week have their own brand associations. New Englanders will recall that “Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day” - remember the commercial? More recently, Instagram’s co-opted “Throwback Thursday” encourages users to post historical reminiscences both personal and cultural.
Brand-new Holiday
So is a brand-new holiday still an effective way for brands to communicate with their audiences? Yes and no. Consumers look to brands to tell them something about themselves. They think of themselves as singular, so it’s no longer enough for a brand to differentiate - it must also be singular.
Brand holidays used to be unique. It wasn’t always apparent that a holiday was invented by a brand, but even when it was made-up it wasn’t a common practice. Now, brands are expected to have an awareness of the full calendar of “holidays.” I’ve said it before in Branding is Sex – “Today’s options are tomorrow’s standard equipment.” It’s no longer novel to have a holiday, it’s expected. Your audience will expect you to have an awareness of the trends. Even debuting a new holiday won’t have the same return on investment that it used to. Consumers have adjusted their expectations.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that we’re above it. I was very pleased when the city of Austin presented me with my own holiday. June 20th, 2016 - “Branding is Sex Day”, as proclaimed by Mayor Steve Adler. It’s no National Financial Crimefighter Day (October 26th), but it does have a nice ring to it.
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