Don’t Leave Your Marketing Team Alone For Too Long

“So, I’ve had an idea, you might think it’s a bit crazy, but just hear me out. What if we say that the third Monday of every year is the saddest day of the year and we should call it Blue Monday?”

(hush falls over the room)

“Why would we want to tell people that?”

“Because it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we tell them they’re sad, then they’ll think they are; and what do people do when they’re feeling down? Spend money.”

Back in 2005, a travel company had a great (okay, maybe that’s a bit strong) idea to suggest that the third Monday of January is the saddest day of the year. The aim was to encourage people to book a holiday in order to make themselves happier.

Based on what can only be described as questionable research, the travel agent hired a published psychologist to put together a formula that considered the impact of the following: weather at this time of year, people’s probable level of debt, time after Christmas and new year’s resolutions, generally lower motivation levels and feeling a need to take action. As a result, the equation produced the result of the third Monday of January as the saddest day.

There’s two ways to look at this: does actual data back up the research? Are we really that much more melancholy during the 20th of January as a nation? Or you can look at it from the other perspective; has that kernel of an idea made up in a boardroom of a marketing meeting actually made people spend more money?

Well, for the former, personal experience is obviously different from person to person. There’s no data analysis on how every person is feeling on the third Monday of January compared to other days, and personal circumstances affect general mood.

However, understanding the impact that the idea has had on our spending habits gives us some interesting insight into the power of this specific marketing campaign.

January is busy, busy, busy for travel agents. Research into holiday bookings has found that the largest proportion of holidays are booked in January, with 44% of holidays booked during the month. So, it’s safe to say that the campaign worked. People feel as though they are more sad because they’ve been told they are, and to cheer themselves up they reach for their cards and book holidays.

Blue Monday is of course just one in a sea of other “days” that are supposedly based on data, but are ultimately commercially motivated. Blue Monday’s partner in crime, the Yellow Day (June 20th, if you were wondering) is supposedly the happiest day of the year.

Some of the sceptics amongst you might be thinking, surely this is just another idea dreamed up in a marketing meeting as a scheme to get you to spend more money - you’d be absolutely correct!

And guess who dreamt up the formula to measure it as the happiest day of the year? Yep, you guessed it - the same psychologist who decreed the third Monday of January to be the saddest (this time, however, their services were recruited by an Ice Cream company).

Once again, no data actually shows that we are any happier during June than we are in January but, as a group, our Ice Cream consumption increases. I wonder if it’s because that’s the happiest we’ll be all year, or it’s because of the warmer weather?

Sometimes, it’s worth looking at the reason why companies make these sorts of proclamations without any hard data. We aren’t any happier or much more sad during these respective days, but that’s not the point - for the organisations who came up with these days, the data shows that it’s worked a treat.