Valentine’s Day

My mum always had little stickers on the tiles in the toilet. Every sticker represented a month of the year and every month had a little rhyme. The month of february said: “Start de dag met een glimlach, want the 14e is het Valentijnsdag (start the day with a smile, because it’s Valentine’s day on the 14th). Coming from a background in which valentine is not celebrate very elaborately, I had to ask my mum what valentine was all about. I guess from that time the sense and nonsense of valentine has been imprinted in my memory as something silly and unnecessary. Maybe that doesn’t reflect her opinion, but it does reflect the impression I got from it back-then. Quite right…

My opinion about Valentine hasn’t changed much over time. Just like santa-clause, who was invented by Coca Cola (I hope you all know that he has nothing to do with the “spirit of christmas and was invented in the greatest marketing campaign ever), Valentine looks more like a another very carefully planned marketing campaign for flower-shops, restaurants and the chocolate industry. It would also not surprise me if Coca Cola is in this list as well, as they of course get their share through the restaurants.

So why do people celebrate Valentine’s day anyway? Because the minister of commerce says so! Together with the industry, every year the Valentine’s-campaign is planned extremely carefully and delicately through major PR in most media targeting at women. Many of these magazines elaborately write about Valentine and do their share of conditioning to create those demands. Now, the thing about demand generation campaigns is that you try to seduce a person into buying your goods. For the valentine campaign it works even trickier, instead of generating the demand at your target market, the demand is generated at their partners. This is a very smart and when the demands are carried over to the purchaser, the message becomes