ALL WE NEED IS ANOTHER CONSUMER-DRIVEN HOLIDAY Elizabeth Weise
Amazon Prime Day delivers a new day for the mobile-app era
Amazon’s Prime Day is the latest holiday to be ginned up for the purposes of selling goods, extending a trend that includes Black Friday, Cyber Monday and, more recently, Alibaba’s $14.3 billion Singles’ Day.
To become the kind of tradition that gets printed on calendars and factors into sales forecasts, however, it will need to become bigger than Amazon. And maybe change its name.
“Amazon has a stake in wanting this to become a holiday, but so do the other retailers. Not that Walmart or Best Buy would say publicly ‘ We love Amazon Prime Day,’ but the fact is they had deals to compete with the Amazon deals, and they sold a lot,” said Melissa Arnoff, a marketing expert with public relations firm Levick in Washington, D.C.
Consumers have shown that when there’s a deal to be had, the cultural, historic or religious hooks can be tenuous. That’s the case for Prime Day, set in July, when retail is insulated from major giftgiving holidays.
Amazon’s shopping deals, which were open only to the 44 million Prime members it is estimated to have had on its first Prime Day last year, were snatched up. It managed to get orders for 34.4 million items worldwide, breaking its Black Friday sales records and pushing multiple other retailers Jack Ma, chairman of Alibaba Group, on Singles’ Day 2015. to follow its lead, hoping to catch some of the sales slipstream.
But “for it to catch on as a really cultural phenomenon, as opposed to an economic success, there needs to be an emotional component,” Arnoff said.
Take Mother’s Day.
Originally launched by West Virginian Anna Jarvis in 1908 to honor mothers, by 1911 it was being observed across the country. By the 1920s, the day had become a major selling point for greetingcard manufacturers, candy makers and florists.
In fact, Jarvis was appalled at the commercialization of what she saw as a sacred day and went on to spend much of the rest of her life fighting what it had become.
Another example is Black Friday. It started in 1960s Philadelphia, when Philadelphia Bulletin reporter Joseph Barrett recirculated the police department’s use of the term to describe the terrible gridlock caused by hordes of people coming into town on the day after Thanksgiving to attend the annual Army-Navy football game and to shop downtown. But it didn’t become a national shopping phenomenon until the late 1980s, when it was recast as the day retailers’ accounts “went into the black” after losing money all year, due to strong pre-Christmas sales.
Of even more recent origin is Cyber Monday, first coined in 2005 by Ellen Davis of the National Retail Federation.
It began in the early 2000s, when online shopping was still new and most consumers didn’t have Internet access at home. After shopping in brick-and-mortar stores on Black Friday, they couldn’t do any online buying until they came back to work on Monday where they had access to computers and high-speed Internet connections.
The epitome of this trend is the Chinese buying frenzy Singles’ Day, on Nov. 11. It began as a low-key event among university students in Nanjing in the 1990s, a day for bachelors to gather with friends and meet new people. The date, 11-11, was chosen because it’s a grouping of 1’s, or singles.
Less than a decade later, it’s become a huge cultural event in China and across Asia. Last year, it began with a gala opening in Beijing and a huge, star-studded variety show broadcast on nationwide TV. Alibaba made a record $14.3 billion in sales.
As for Prime Day, other retailers seek a new name to de-emphasize Amazon’s role.
The most popular seems to be “Black Friday July,” said Howard Schaffer, general manager of Offers.com.