Valentine’s Day…

A dream of a day when every girl seeks her Romeo with longing eyes and a heartful of hope, and every man drives that extra mile to pick just the perfect red rose for his coveted Juliet.

And then, he asks her out. Maybe for a cup of coffee at the farthest Starbucks, or a glass of Rosé, with butterflies in their stomachs and hearts bubbling with joy.

Yes… A perfect day!

A perfect day… with a perfect pay.
For the shops.

The shops that sell you a stick of rose for 800 rupees that you can get for free from your neighbour’s perfectly trimmed garden. Okay, so maybe not completely free. Your neighbour, Mr. Scrooge, might just unleash his hounds on you but at least it won’t put a dent in your pocket!

Not unlike other celebrations, Valentine’s Day has been plugged in the middle of February to coincide with the Pagan festival called Lupercalia.

An ancient Roman festival, Lupercalia was celebrated as an honour to Juno, the Roman goddess of marriage, and the Capitoline She-Wolf (or Lupa Capitolina) who suckled the twin founders of the city of Rome, Romulus and Remus, who were abandoned as infants.

Now, here, think dating apps but much more violent and sexually provocative.

The day of Lupercalia saw two groups of priests, descended from Romulus and Remus respectively, meeting in the Luperical Cave in the Palentine Hill, celebrating with a grand feast including plenty amounts of wine.

Now, well fed and drunk, the priests would move on to “holy practices”, sacrificing goats along with a dog, which was a substitute or stand-in for the “mythical wolf”. This sacrificial blood was then placed on to the priests’ foreheads and washed off with goats’ milk. Apparently, killing innocent animals, then applying their blood on your body, then removing it with milk of their brethren was considered to wash away feud and violence.

Irony is quite dead, I guess.

And that’s not all. These sacrificed goats were then scalped, their hides used in making whips which the priests would run up and down with, buck naked, whipping people as they ran.

And… people wanted to be whipped, believing this would bring them good luck and fertility.

I mean…

Imagine being a woman on the streets of Rome, watching a naked man running at you with a bloody whip, and holding out your hand in servitude so you would be lashed just so you could have a kid… with someone else.

50 shades of Ancient Rome, huh!

And no, wait. It doesn’t end here…

There was a lottery system! Men would randomly choose a woman’s name from the pile, spend the day with her and if it worked out, they would get married.

Imagine Tinder, but only with men being allowed the right swipe

#GenderEquality :p

The “rebranding” of Valentine’s Day was perhaps one of the most profitable  masterstrokes of Christianity as a religion.

In 2022, lovers in US spent more than $21 billion dollars on Valentine’s Day gifts, and in Europe, this spend was a whopping £1 billion! And in 2023, this number is estimated to go up to $26 billion US Dollars!

But the burning question is… How did Valentine’s Day become a commercial success!

What really shaped Valentine’s Day into the gory, puke-inducing celebration of “spending on gooey love” drama that we witness today?!

Valentine’s Day was brought into the mainstream media by a 20-year-old graduate of Mount Holyoke College, named Esther Howland, dubbed by Boston Globe as the “pioneer maker of valentines”.

Esther’s father, Southworth, was the owner of a large bookstore and stationery shop in Worcester, Massachusetts, known for its wide collection of hymn books and Sunday School texts. In this shop were also displayed the richly designed and lace-covered valentines imported from England, and thus weren’t affordable for Americans.

Esther, following the textbook principle of “going upmarket”, produced a few prototypes of these valentine’s products specifically for the American market, selling them at an outrageously luxury price of 75 cents, which was 3/4th of the daily earnings of an average American worker.

She convinced her brother to include these prototypes in his inventory on his next sales trip promoting their father’s business.

The products were an immediate success. Her brother returned from his trip with over $5,000 worth of orders for Esther, who immediately hired four women helpers and incorporated a company called New England Valentine Co. devoted to Valentine’s day gifts. The following year, the orders doubled! By 1864, NEVC had expanded its business to Cincinnati, Ohio, and six years later, in Gold Hill, Nevada.

Boston Globe has estimated her annual sales at between $50,000 and $75,000, a tremendous revenue at the time!

As this day of “love” began entering the public domain, brands hopped on the profitability train with an assortment of products we, even today, associate deeply with Valentine’s Day.

With Chocolates being in vogue among the Victorian English upper class, John Cadbury built a booming business with his tea, coffee, cocoa and drinking chocolates. It was his sons, Richard and George Cadbury, who made revolutionary innovations that have shaped the “candy culture” as we know it today.

Richard Cadbury designed assorted chocolates which are still in style, some 200 years later, with decorative boxes, complemented by a small picture on their front that could be cut out and preserved as tokens of art.

In 1868, Richard launched the first heart-shaped box of chocolates for Valentine’s Day.

And thus began the culture of gifting chocolates to express your love to the artistic sensibilities of your “crush”.

With its success in England, chocolates were now brought to America by Hershey Chocolate Company, with their flagship product of Hershey’s Kisses.

Designed in 1894 by Henry Oscar Wilbur from Lititz, Penn., the Kiss was originally called the Wilbur Bud whose shape was achieved through a cumbersome process of melting chocolate, pouring it into a teardrop-shaped mould and waiting for it to solidify. Hershey, with his revolutionary mass-production processes streamlined the systems for faster production, and added a cherry to the cake – the foil.

With a simple wrapping, Hershey was able to give consumers a candy they could carry around without chocolate melting all over, preserving the shape of “the kiss”, and forever etching the product in our minds as a go-to gift for special someone’s in our lives.

In the mid-1800s, Lozenges were all the craze as a popular remedy for sore throats and bad breath. Oliver Chase jumped the fashion train with his invention of the first candy-making machine with the incorporation of New England Confectionery Company (NECCO) wafers. These candies became so popular that the US government even requisitioned them for World War 2 soldiers as a premier portable candy.

In 1866, Oliver’s brother, Daniel, figured out a way to print words on candy with vegetable dye, introducing to the world “Conversation Candies”, which became a heart-shaped delicacy somewhere around 1902, sporting witty messages of kindling love. By the turn of century, conversation heart candies had already become a Valentine’s cliché.

The earliest surviving Valentine’s Day card was written by Charles, the Duke of Orleans, a prisoner in the Tower of London, captured by the English during the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.

It was written to his wife, Bonne of Armagnac, with the words:

Following the success of Howland’s Valentine’s Cards and then the exponential profits of George C. Whitney Company, which had bought the NEVC in later years, Hallmark sold its first Valentine’s Card in 1913, and went on to producing its own design in 1916 – a significant milestone in the day’s commercialization process.

This line has been etched deeply in the mind of every woman who judges the love of her man through how much he spends on her, and of every man who has to dish out his months of salary to prove his love to the woman he has been “lucky to get”.

Before the 20th century, engagement rings were a luxury item and very rarely were diamonds a part of these.

DeBeers diamond company changed this game in 1948 through N.W. Ayer & Son’s campaign of “A Diamond is Forever”, sentimentalizing the gems so they wouldn’t be resold by the owners, thus creating market demand and consumer aspiration, filling a deep psychological need for otherwise intrinsically worthless products.

Maslow would be proud, huh!

Hence, in 1948, diamonds entered the market as a high-end gifting jewellery, becoming an “expression of committed love”.

This stroke of genius has resulted in a sale of $4.1 billion on jewellery in 2022 in US alone!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pU6WQXkiOU

The Valentine Assorted.

By 1980s, companies like Hallmark had expanded into a line of products wholly dedicated to Valentine’s Day.

Hallmark launched a commercial in 1985, dubbing the company as “The Valentine’s Store”, as a one-stop shop for love-professing cards and heart-shaped products to woo your latest crush.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md6CbE8tGGA

In 1986, Hershey’s repackaged its Kisses in pink and red foil for Valentine’s Day, making the candies a V Day staple.

Chanel joined the frenzy with its “Le Film” commercial for Chanel No. 5 perfume, starring Nicole Kidman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hcaaKhGL00

Love is Online…

In 2005, Valentine’s Day went digital! YouTube, a popular video sharing company today, was launched as an online dating site on February 14, 2005, giving single people a platform for making videos introducing themselves and informing what “they were looking for” for prospective viewers to find their “the one”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJg8Z0dL350

Love on Wheels…

In 2013, the ride sharing company, Uber, launched its “Romance on Demand” service, allowing users to send flowers through the app on V Day. This later progressed to “UberSKY” – a way for loved ones to skywrite messages for their loved ones.

(shakes head in disbelief)

2016 saw Netflix trending for #happyvalentinesday and 2017 saw Google Doodle showing pangolins, the only mammal species with scales, serenading and gifting their lovely pangolin crushes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwhIPl11K30

Well, you know a trend has taken off when even animals start following in :p

Poor Pangolins…

Valentine’s Day, from its bloody roots to its red roses, has carefully captured the hearts of desperate lovers, forming a social pressure around showering your love-interest with expensive gifts or else running the risk of “You don’t care about me” emotional blackmails.

Whether you like it or not, February 14 brings with it a crater in your pockets if you’re in a relationship or a stab in your heart if you’re single. With social media becoming an integral part of our every-second lives, there is a virtual race to show “My boyfriend loves me more” or “I’m hotter because I have more Valentines” or “I’m the best husband ever and now my wife can’t blame me for sleeping with my secretary because I got her a Cartier necklace” or “Oh, I’ll get on Bumble now because I can’t be single on Valentine’s!”.

In this desperate attempt to one up all others on this “Day of Love”, we are spending more and more from our hard-earned salaries, chipping away from our “college fund”, delaying our rents, cutting down on food, because this year’s Valentine’s Day gift has to surpass last year’s or “she would leave me for that idiot with a Maserati.”

Love your husband? Great.

Want to shower your girlfriend with expensive gifts? Great.

But do it because you want to.

Do it because you can.

Don’t do it because you have to.

Be a good lover. Don’t become a Marketer’s dream.

Because as Don Draper has famously said,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjg5TuXV09U&t=27s

On that note, Happy Valentine’s Day!

On a side note, please ignore everything written here because I’m a marketer and my livelihood depends on you spending all your money on your short-termed crushes.

And honey, in the end, you are a consumer and you breathe because a marketer says you can breathe

Cheers! And Happy Spending Day to all you stupid fools!!

<Insert evil laugh here>