Mom received $25 billion worth of love this Mother’s Day!
#mothersday2019, #mobilewatch Anika Sharma
Mom received a lot of love yesterday. $25 billion to be precise with 85% of US adults celebrating the holidays. The 3rdlargest eCommerce day after Christmas and Back-to-School, the spending for mother’s day has been rising steadily, already up $2 billion from last year’s spend. Even though the official numbers still have to come in, the spend this year is already slated to be the highest in the 16 years since spending has been tracked for the holiday.
The good news is that consumers today are happy to celebrate not just moms on this day but all kinds of mother figures. Aunts, Grandmothers, stepmoms, sisters and of course, moms all make the list. And all of them saw a lot of love. Those celebrating were expected to spend approximately $196 compared to $180 in 2018. Those between 35–44 probably spent an average of $248 yesterday, compared to $224 in 2018. Men, as always, spent more on Mother’s Day — a whopping $237 this year compared with $158 in 2018.
We all know that online is where retail is seeing the most growth but when it came to Mothers Day, as many as 29% of Americans bought their gifts online. Thanks to Amazon and other frictionfree eCommerce experiences, it is now easier to send Mom some love whether she is in Tanzania or Tennessee. Gifting an experience continues to creep into the list, along with time and tested gifts such as jewelry, flowers, greeting cards and eating out. The spending on jewelry is expected to be more than $5 billion, making up the largest pie of the $20 billion spend, seeing an increase of 31% YOY.
Consumers are continuously looking for unique gifts as well as one that creates a special memory. Many of those celebrating cited finding something unique (44%) as the most important factor when picking out a Mother’s Day gift, followed by one that creates a special memory (39%). More than 8 in 10 (81%) indicated that they look to retailers for gifting inspiration.
However, the holiday was not always this commercial. Its founder, Anna Jarvis, launched the holiday to celebrate her mother, who always yearned for a holiday that celebrated mothers everywhere. She launched this holiday in Virginia, post her mother’s death in 1905 andbegan a letter-writing campaign to garner support for a national Mother’s Day holiday with the help of friends and reaching out to many influential leaders such as William Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, and John Wannamaker. Anna like her mother, believed that mothers deserved their own special day and that it would help further strengthen family bonds.
She persuaded her mother’s church in West Virginia to celebrate Mother’s Day on the second anniversary of her mother’s death, the 2nd Sunday of May. By 1911 Mother’s Day was celebrated in almost every state of the US. The day became popular enough for it to be recognized as an official celebration by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914, to be celebrated in the second Sunday in May as “a public expression of love and reverence for the mothers of our country.” Since then, thanks in part to Hallmark, the holiday has spread and celebrated worldwide.
The way Anna envisioned the holiday; she saw it as a clear celebration of the ‘mother’ and not mother figures or mother like figures. And she was definitely not happy with the growing commercialization of the holiday. Anna died in a sanitarium, fighting till her end those who did not celebrate the holiday in the way that she had envisioned it. Anna also detested the fact that some groups seized the chance to use the holiday as a way to raise funds for various charitable causes, including mothers-in-need. Perhaps this was simply because those organizations were not really monitored back then and were using the day to make money under the garb of a charitable organization.
“To have Mother’s Day the burdensome, wasteful, expensive gift day that Christmas and other special days have become, is not our pleasure,” Anna Jarvis wrote in the 1920s. “If the American people are not willing to protect Mother’s Day from the hordes of money schemers that would overwhelm it with their schemes, then we shall cease having a Mother’s Day — and we know how.”
Anna’s intent was not to profit from the holiday that she launched and she never did, using her own funds to fight her cause against those who wanted to commercialize the holiday. In fact she saw the day as her intellectual and legal property, to be defended by lawyers who brought cases against those who she thought was misusing or misrepresenting the celebration. She died in a sanitarium, penniless, at age 84.
Flowers have always been a huge part of Mother’s Day, thanks to Anna. The white carnation, the favorite flower of Anna Jarvis’s mother, was the original flower of Mother’s Day. “The carnation does not drop its petals, but hugs them to its heart as it dies, and so, too, mothers hug their children to their hearts, their mother love never dying,” Jarvis explained in a 1927 interview. Today, the sentiment has extended to all kinds of flowers to celebration the one that mom loves the most. Flowers and plants are now such a big part of Mother’s Day that in many parts of the US, children often start the annual planting season by joining their mothers in home gardens, planting all kinds of flowering plants.
Thanks to Anna Jarvis, we now have a universal holiday to celebrate Mothers. But, even though mothers are universal, the celebration of the day can be pretty unique in many parts of the world:
In Yugoslavia, The children sneak into their mother’s bedroom and tie her up in bed, so that when she gets up, she has to promise the children all kinds of gifts that she has hidden in order to be free again.
In Japan, Young children draw pictures called “My Mother” and enter them into an exhibit. This exhibit of “ My Mother” pictures then travels to many different countries around the world.
In Sweden, they sell little plastic flowers before Mother’s Day and then use the money to send mothers that have many children on a well-deserved vacation.
In the UK, Mother’s Day is more popularly known as Mothering Sunday, the origins of the holiday date back to centuries when it was considered important for churchgoers to visit their home or “mother” church once a year.
So how does one grab a share of the $25 billion Mother’s Day marketshare? Free and fast shipping (55%) are still magic words for all those who are looking to buy gifts online or in-store. And of course, special offers (44%) and coupons (41%) help clinch the deal for those who may be sitting on the fence. Most importantly, a great user experience with quick site load times and a frictionfree experience will ensure that you are the destination of choice when it comes to pleasing mom.
If you are a small retailer, make long-tail keywords your bffs. It’s your best bet to fight the bidding wars on short-tail keywords by big retailers. So more lower funnel than upper funnel, optimizing for conversions versus traffic. Is there a sure-fire way to win market share for this huge ecommerce holiday? Well, mother may not best, but I am sure, as she would say: “there’s plenty of room for everyone in the sand box!” So, don’t be afraid to play!
Join me every week, as we navigate these ever-changing waters to make sense of this ‘always-on’, ‘always-connected’ consumer and the technologies that define their everyday. I will be bringing you insights from some of the sharpest global minds in the industry as well as in academia. And do join the conversation.
Until next week
Anika
A seasoned Advertising and Digital expert, Anika has worked across countries and continents and spoken at companies such as Google and universities such as New York University. She is currently Professor of Business at New York University’s Stern School of Business, teaching Digital marketing, Social Media, Mobile and Digital Strategy. Follow Anika on twitter @anikadas.
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