During her 15 years of research, consumers admitted they simply didn’t feel included in the holiday, as if it were a party and they didn’t get an invitation. There’s also something to be said of the emotional turmoil that can accompany the holiday, especially feelings of loneliness, depression, and isolation. For some, Valentine’s Day can feel tortuous, and statistics have shown an annual rise in severe mental health crises around the day.
But unlike the Victorian Era, with its focus on heteronormative ideas of coupledom and romance, inclusivity for Valentine’s Day celebrations has drastically expanded in recent years. “Understanding this little-understood fact that love is broad — it’s not just romantic love — is a huge part of the market,” Scheinbaum says. “From a human being point of view, inclusion is important, but also from a business and marketing point of view. It’s called market expansion, and Hallmark is brilliant at doing this with some of their advertising for the holiday. Only depicting romantic love and card exchange would be totally excluding all these other types of love, [like] children exchanging little cards or giving teachers cards, or women giving each other friendship cards, or people bringing colleagues or coworkers cards,” she explains. Plus, card brands such as Hallmark help consumers express their affections in ways that not everyone can articulate through their own writing.
As cliche as it may sound, Valentine’s Day has always been my favorite holiday. Every year, to this day, my mother has gifted me a thoughtful card and beautifully wrapped little trinkets. Gift giving became a part of her love language as a working single mother with limited free time; a way to express affection in a tangible form. So, capitalist materialism aside, gifting small tokens of affection was integrated in my love language too.
Scheinbaum notes, however, that some consumers are turned off by the overt materialism of the holiday. “We have seen evidence of what I call ‘market resistance,’ where consumers consciously opt out of entire broad markets because of personal reasons, such as wanting to be more anti-materialism or they want to celebrate the holiday in less commercialized ways,” she says. Examples include couples gifting each other “anti-gift certificates,” deciding to stay home and celebrate together without buying material goods. “It’s not that they’re anti-Valentine’s Day, it’s that they’re making a conscious decision to be counterculture when it comes to [the holiday], with sustainable ideas such as making your own Valentine’s Day card.”
Abigail Baehr, chief strategy officer for the ad agency Crispin Porter Bogusky, also highlights the surprising role of commercialism and marketing as a catalyst for more inclusivity surrounding the holiday. “In the 1980s in the U.S., when Hallmark flipped from sending one Valentine to the person you love to turning it into something that was more competitive — like, how many Valentines you received — was an interesting [change],” says Baehr.
I remember this competitiveness firsthand. When I was in grade school in the '90s, the more Valentines a person received, the cooler they were. By the time high school came around, special class deliveries of gifts, stuffed animals, balloons, and cards were made throughout the school day, and if the Valentine contained an anonymous gift from an admirer, it meant you were coveted and desirable. It became a kind of social currency.
