5 Valentines Brand Moments That Made A Buzz

Valentines day is here and, whether you’re online or walking down the high street, you just can’t escape the buzz of the national day.

Whatever your thoughts on the holiday, you can guarantee brands will jump on the annual hype (history links key brands like Hallmark and Cadbury’s as complicit in turning Valentine’s into the commercial ‘cards and chocolates’ format that we know today).

Every brand from retail, beauty and entertainment, right through to B2B suppliers, run campaigns each year to stand out. Here’s five of our favourite Valentines brand marketing moments from the past few years:

Deliveroo commissioned a valentines-themed poll that had some surprising results! The delivery service found that 64% of couple preferred to dine in at home and over a third would enjoy having a ‘third wheel’ friend at the dinner table. All of this combined into their fun campaign, Third Wheel Kevin.

Candlelit Dinner – Greggs

The chain transformed a selection of stores into fully-fledged romantic restaurants and partnered with booking app OpenTable to give consumers the ideal budget Valentines experience. Visitors to the pop-up eateries could enjoy mood-lighting, classical music and candles as they sampled a four-course romantic dinner with prosecco.

The Love You Take – Adidas

A simple but effective brand moment. Adidas took the 2016 Valentines holiday as an opportunity to post a same-sex message of love. The brand posted a picture of a female couple’s legs with matching shoes on its Instagram along with the caption “The love you take is equal to the love you make.” The picture went viral, racking up a number of hateful comments – but Adidas kept up their message with the response: “No, this day is for LOVE. Happy Valentine’s Day.”

£1 Engagement Ring – Poundland

This year’s most talked about brand moment is from budget store, Poundland. The store is selling a range of £1 engagement rings and the conversation around whether the concept is genius, or tacky, has earnt the retailer column inches in just about every British publication. Estimates say that they’ve sold 20,000 of the rings so far – so chances are one of them could be winging their way towards someone you know.

#LoveSausage – M&S

Another talking point this year is the M&S ‘Love Sausage’, a heart-shaped sausage ideal for adorning a romantic dinner plate. Using taglines like ‘say it with sausages’ and ‘are you ready for our love sausage’ the family-friendly store has raised a few eyebrows, with people flocking to online platforms to express their love (or distaste) for the product.

Plan Your Own Valentines Campaign in 2020

Valentines can be an effective marketing tool, if done correctly. Once you’ve thought of a way in which your product or services can be linked relatively to the sentiment, you can enjoy capitalising  on the huge volumes of search and buying trends. For help planning dynamic content ideas that will engage your audience, get in touch today!