Businesses are always on the lookout for meaningful ways to engage with the audience. This is why companies are happy to leap onto the marketing opportunity that commemorative days and holidays present to relate with this audience, and hopefully, convert their interest into sales. Valentine’s Day, Christmas, and Pride are defined as much by the flurry of commercial activity they spark as anything else and International Mother’s Day is no exception.
Flowers, cards, and sweets are typically the gifts of choice when paying homage to the person who is singlehandedly responsible for bringing you into the world. It is one of the holidays that sees the most flowers bought and sold. According to the Society of American Florists, Mother’s Day is responsible for about 26% of all the flowers sold in a given year. In the U.S., Mother’s Day is also when the most phone calls are made in a year with 122 million calls being made in 2023. While not all of these calls would have been made to moms, it is fair to expect that at least a significant position of it was. All these data points go to show just how important a commemorative day or holiday can be from a purely marketing standpoint. Given everyone’s investment in the occasion, it’s no wonder that companies leap at the chance to introduce some variety into their usual marketing content.
However, while some might welcome the chance to appreciate and celebrate their mothers – it’s also important to understand that the day might be a sensitive one for some. Coping with the loss of their mother is an unfortunate reality for a lot of people. Others may not share a relationship with their mother’s that they look back on with fondness. Still, some may have mothers who are by circumstance or fate separated from them, for whom Mother’s Day marketing content might be a painful reminder. These nuances are things that brands are also increasingly recognising. This is now giving rise to a culture of allowing consumers to opt out of marketing for certain occasions, or straight up allowing them to set up personalised ad preferences when signing up for advertising content.
Mother’s Day as we know it traces its roots back to the early 20th century when Anna Jarvis from America started commemorating the day her mother passed – the second Sunday of May – in remembrance of a mother’s unending sacrifices for her children and family. However, there is historical evidence to believe that dedicating a special day to the celebration of motherhood also has Greek and Roman origins. Today, over one hundred countries celebrate Mother’s Day every year, albeit on different days. Given how Mother’s Day has been commercialised in recent times, it’s also important to note that Anna Jarvis was quite disappointed about how her intent had been exploited by businesses. While Mother’s Day became an official U.S. holiday in 1914, Jarvis spent most of the latter years of her life trying to get it removed from the calendar.
This is why it’s particularly meaningful that more and more brands are becoming evermore aware of the emotional fatigue they may be creating for their audience. U.S. and Canadian companies like Etsy, Momofuku Goods, and Fable Home are just some of the brands that are allowing this feature.
Momofuku Goods is allowing its customers to opt out of Mohter’s Day-related email marketing campaigns for the very first time this year. According to company data, over 10,000 of the people who subscribe to their email content have opted out of Mother’s Day marketing. According to Retention and lifecycle marketing manager Emma Hughes, the brand must remember that its “email list is filled with many people who could be experiencing… pain and sadness during these holidays.” Fable Home has always received positive options when they first started allowing customers to opt out from being marketed to during a potentially triggering event.
However, there are a few issues that businesses must consider before deciding to go all in, creating an opt-out option for your holiday marketing. For one, it’s not always that customers take the opportunity you provide for them to opt out of marketing temporarily. According to the data presented in the Consumer Email Tracker 2023 report, most consumers appear to take the opportunity to opt out of email marketing altogether. On the other hand, if you intend to spare the feelings of those who might feel triggered by holiday marketing, seeing the opt-out email will only trigger the same emotions in your clientele. It will also only add to the overall experience of the average consumer who finds the unending marketing material being directed their way annoying.
Holidays and commemorative days also don’t always fall on the same day for people around the world. Asking someone who finds it a sensitive subject whether they want to opt out of Mother’s Day marketing in May when their country celebrated it two months ago will only prolong the negative feelings it brings up. From a marketing standpoint, it also makes little sense to make audiences aware of the potentially negative aspects of subscribing to marketing content at all.
(Theruni Liyanage)