The shopping-holiday season
Singles Day and friends that are taking over the world
We have seen an interesting phenomenon in the past few years with the globalization of the internet: It’s gotten harder and harder to tell whether someone’s clean, minimalist kitchen is in Australia or in, say, Italy. 24/7 access to photos, videos, and people around the world is flattening out tastes, too. And when we all add similar brands to our Pinterest boards, we start seeing various promos for holidays and events that aren’t necessarily originating in the corner of the (physical) world we inhabit.
That cross-border migration is becoming more evident in commerce. Take Black Friday, for example. It is a term that was first used to describe an 1869 stock market crash before taking on a retail-centric vibe in reference to merchants who move from being in-the-red to in-the-black as they finally start turning a profit on the day after Thanksgiving in late November. That’s when crowds of Americans partake in that great national pastime: shopping. Black Friday has gradually spread outside the US to other countries where it lacks the same cultural context. In the 2010s, for instance, American retailers began holding Black Friday events in the UK, where there is no Thanksgiving holiday preceding it (unless you’re an American expat living in the UK and eating sad turkey dinners at the local pub). In 2014, the future of Black Friday in the UK seemed uncertain when events across the nation got out of hand, but by 2017, November sales had exceeded December’s. (If you’re going to emulate Black Friday in another country and aren't bound by the cultural significance around it, why not pick a different random day, like July 1?)
Since shopping is such a big national pastime and big business in the US, it’s perhaps natural that we’ve exported our shopping holidays elsewhere. Now, largely thanks to that flattening of cultural norms on the internet, we’re also starting to import them. One such event that is already starting to make its way from East to West is Singles Day.
The world’s biggest shopping holiday
Chinese university students started Singles Day in the ‘90s as a celebration of being single. It’s held on 11/11 (the 1’s symbolize singlehood). The massive ecommerce platform Alibaba almost single-handedly turned the unofficial holiday into a one-day shopping event in 2009 with the premise of giving single people an excuse to shop for themselves. What’s not to love about that? That first year, Alibaba hyped its own shopping marketplace with steep discounts, ringing in some $7 million in one day.
By 2015, a year after Alibaba went public, Singles Day raked in $14 billion, breaking the Guinness World Record at the time for most online sales revenue in 24 hours by a single company. In 2019, Alibaba’s Singles Day haul topped $38 billion, and this year, $84.5 billion in merchandise was sold through Alibaba’s platform during what is now a multi-week shopping festival culminating on 11/11. That’s an 8.5% increase over last year, but growth has slowed, down from a 26% increase in 2020. JD.com, another Chinese ecom giant, generated $54.6 billion in revenue from Singles Day events, which it began running in late October. For comparison’s sake, Black Friday sales in the US in 2020 — largely online due to the pandemic — reached “only” $9 billion. We can point to a few factors driving the success of Singles Day, including the general ease of shopping and transacting online in Asia.
Another smaller but still culturally significant shopping holiday in China is for the Lunar New Year, when people give loved ones red envelopes with money inside as a symbol for good fortune. With promotions such as virtual red envelopes with gift certificates for merchandise instead of cash, brands such as Starbucks, Nike, and McDonald’s have also started trying to attach themselves to this cultural event, even though the actual cultural event may be thousands of miles away.
That’s what fascinates us: The internet has flattened our experiences so much that it’s become possible to have these very similar experiences around the world, even when there is no underlying local cultural connection.
Global beacons
There have always been culturally significant holidays, but with everyone transacting online — particularly during the pandemic — they’ve become almost like global beacons that even brands that are only vaguely aware of the Chinese market will consider creating this type of shopping holiday in other regions.
One US version of that would be Amazon’s Prime Day. Of course, this isn’t a real holiday, but due to the prominence of the Amazon platform — it’s now the world’s largest retailer outside China — Prime Day has become a real national shopping holiday, not just in terms of volume of goods transacted, but it’s also now ingrained in our collective cultural understanding of commerce in the US. It would be difficult to find anyone who is not aware of Prime Day; that’s a pretty big achievement in six years. At the same time, Amazon has served as sort of a platform catalyst that has spurred its competitors to also throw big sales to compete with Prime Day, as if they’re afraid of missing out. First launched in 2015 to mark Amazon’s 20th anniversary, this year’s Amazon Prime Day — which actually expanded to 48 hours — topped $11 billion, a 6.1% increase year over year. That includes sales from other large retailers like Walmart, Target and Kohl’s who joined in.
How to approach shopping holidays
For a brand, it’s an interesting challenge to take something with a very clear cultural context in one region and port it into another region. Many brands try. Adobe, Brooks Brothers, ASOS, and Estee Lauder, for example, have all experimented with Singles Day, and Apple, Nike, and Adidas each reportedly rang in $14 million in Singles Day sales in 2018. This year, we saw smaller beauty brands in our Instagram ad feed subtly calling out Single’s Day, which isn’t a thing yet in many markets, but because of how connected everyone is, it will probably be a much bigger thing soon.
If you’re a brand, what should you do? A few suggestions:
1. Look at your annual calendar. Familiarize yourself with these large international holidays — shopping or otherwise — that can drive a lot of activity and engagement, even if they aren't in your core market. For example, let's say you have zero presence in China and are wondering why you should even care about things like Singles Day. You should pay attention because it's very likely that while your core market isn’t aware of it now, it will be soon because of how the internet has compressed our shared experiences. It's an opportunity to hook yourself to a larger cultural context that could drive some type of desired consumer behavior that you’d like to instill.
2. Not so fast. Here’s the flipside of that advice to passively pay attention: Awareness of these shopping holidays and other important events can help you avoid accidentally acting insensitively to a significant population because you're not aware of a culturally significant celebration. There are many examples of brands that have cluelessly offered promotions on culturally sensitive days. Don’t become an example. Planning and promoting your biggest sale of the year on Remembrance Day is probably not a great idea.
3: Hold your own. Why not start thinking about organizing your own shopping holiday? A quarterly shopping event could be reasonably easy to pull off. For example, you could hop on a livestream with an influencer who specializes in livestream selling. Piggybacking on an already established event requires less investment in getting the word out, but if you have a well-curated community and direct relationships with your customers, you’re in a good position to experiment.
From planning to execution
What type of activation makes the most sense for a particular shopping holiday? Maybe around Amazon Prime Day, it seems logical to focus your advertising efforts on the Amazon platform. Perhaps you’re approaching other events differently. What’s critical here is whether your tech and partner stacks actually allow you the flexibility to support a shopping holiday successfully. If they don't, you have a different problem on your hands. Maybe you need to focus on building in that flexibility and challenge your advertising partners with questions around how you should approach shopping holidays. Whoever helps you execute your ad tech and mar tech efforts should be a part of this conversation.
For example, can you easily run a live shopping experience, which could be something as simple as talking about your products during a livestream with just an iPhone and ring light? If you are able to participate in a shopping holiday, can your warehouse capabilities support a 100% increase in daily sales? These seem like good problems to have, but in an environment when we know there will be supply chain challenges well into next year, is that something your tech and partner stack can actually help you accommodate?
One question
On a scale of 1 to 10, are all of your systems — from advertising through to warehouse operations — capable of executing a shopping holiday? Lately we've seen a surge of examples where brands continue to advertise products that are marked out of stock, and the most common culprit here is that the relevant advertising and stock management systems don't speak with each other well (or at all).
Dig Deeper
Some examples of brand approaches
Red envelopes and digital redemption
Cover photo by Artem Beliaikin on Unsplash
Thanks for reading,
Ana, Maja, and the Sparrow team
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