For years, Valentine’s day has been the perfect time for brands to create specialized campaigns around this holiday. Love it or hate it, the spending during this holiday gets significantly higher for flowers, chocolates, cards, jewellery, vouchers and any form of gifts.
Who is celebrating Valentine’s day?
According to a survey conducted for online users in India by Forbes,
“over 43% of the users agreed that they were celebrating the holiday with their significant other.”
When you realize this 43% consists of a demographic age anywhere between 18 – 32 where consumer spending is quite high. Around 1 billion dollars was spent last year in the name of love. Valentine’s day has also smartly branched out into a holiday weekend of sorts, where people not only celebrate it with their love interest but also family, friends and pets.
Brands have known to reach out, preferably, to younger influencers that hit their target audience. Brands understand the importance of being included in trusted social media influencers’ gift guides. These bloggers are considered to be some of the most trustworthy sources available online for these followers. So, when a brand gets into a recommendation list, consumers who are already worried about what gift to purchase, lap up their ideas. According to a survey conducted by Greenroom, 71% of the consumers online have agreed that they take a social media personality’s suggestions seriously and influences their purchasing decisions.
Holiday Market Research
It is a great time for brands to research and experiment with their products and services during festivals. Not only do customers’ spendings increase, these consumers voluntarily post their gifts on social media and some of them even tag the brands. Brands have a high chance of making their presence felt by turning this into user-generated content online.
A whopping 25% of search engine generate user-generated content as search results (Economic Times), so it is convenient that customers and bloggers help you become the content that shows up when people are searching for your type of product. Seeing peers post proudly about the gifts they have purchased on social media is probably the best way for one to be influenced.
A popular US-based marketing website has a report which says 16% of Valentine’s day gifts are purchased online. Also, YouTube sees an increase in viewing of videos with the keyword “haul”. Over the past couple of years, videos which have the word haul in the title has gained about 1.3 billion views. This is a great way for the brands to get their products featured as a great gift option. Shein, a China-based fashion website, has seen a boost in sales mainly by targeting YouTube influencers. Hundreds of YouTube videos with the words Shein haul exist currently.
Another fortunate statistic of this holiday is that men seem to be spending twice more than women do. So it helps the brands to target their gift-buying campaigns to men as the day comes closer. Brands tend to kick it up a notch when the day looms as Valentine’s day also has a lot of last-minute shoppers.
Regardless of what product or service a brand sells, the right positioning can ensure sales during these holidays and festivals.
2019 has been a blast for Valentine’s day. Here are some campaigns by brands that went out of the usual heart in a box technique for the holiday.
Allen Solly
Allen Solly took a very unique route in 2019 by working with Trulynomadly
by also encouraging singles to celebrate this holiday. As the caption says “A friendly reminder to all of you single folk who understandably feel alone and unloved on Valentine’s Day and deal with emotions that might snowball this week- UNLEARN the idea that you need someone to complete you and be happy.”
The brand also worked with the social media blogger SettleSubtle to cherish their 9-year long relationship with Allen Solly.
A post shared by Allen Solly (@allensollyindia) on Feb 12, 2019 at 6:51am PST
The campaign was very well received with close to 7000 likes and 50000 reaches in engagement and also seeing a spike in the following of the brand’s Instagram page.
Cadbury’s Silk
Cadbury, an ideal brand for Valentine’s, is known for its campaigns every year during this holiday. As a Valentine’s Day special, the brand released a limited version of a heart embedded in between their usual chocolate bar. This year, we saw two of the young and freshest faces of Bollywood Kartik Aaryan and Yami Gautam in the campaign ‘Saying it with Silk’.
A post shared by KARTIK AARYAN (@kartikaaryan) on Feb 14, 2019 at 2:53am PST
Both their posts seem to have gathered a lot of positive response garnering close to 520k likes and 5000 comments as engagement. Kartik Aaryan’s post received a massive amount of 730k views and Yami Gautam’s likes went close to 240k.
Close Up
Close Up is another brand which knocked it out of the part with its Valentine’s Day campaign. Their campaign for the holiday gathered a whopping 3 million views.
A post shared by Closeup (@closeupindia) on Feb 14, 2019 at 2:08am PST
The couples in the campaign had unique stories of breaking prejudices when it comes to choosing a partner from a different caste, religion or gender, even age.
Fossil India
Fossil also sprung a surprise on their customers on this special day by having artists create art and painting on bags for every item bought. The brand successfully made sure that its walk-in customers walked away happy with a sense of immense satisfaction wanting to come back.
Conclusion
Festivals and holidays are a great time for brands to reposition their existing product or service, no matter what they sell. With some smart campaigns like above, Valentine’s day in 2019 saw one of the biggest retail sales hike with an increase of 18% over the past year. Not only the traditional campaigns, but a lot of Indian brands have openly run LGBTQ based campaigns after the passing of Section 377 this year.
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