Some marketeers conceive the strangest things – I’m looking at your ‘Happy Tax Day!’ card collection Hallmark, and how about that Rainbow Shure! Bert flavor Oreo launched a few years back?
But when Jack Ma, CEO of e-commerce giant Alibaba, predicted that Singles’ Day will become a global holiday within less than 5 years – he wasn’t crazy.
Singles’ Day started out as a couple of Chinese college kids’ anti-Valentine’s Day in 1993, co-opted by Alibaba in 2009. Now it’s celebrated annually on November 11, or 11/11, as the four numerals represent ‘lonely matchsticks’. The idea is that unmarried men and women celebrate singledom by taking to their devices and working the ‘shop ’till you drop’ idiom to an extreme. While Veteran’s Day and the birthdays of Leo DiCaprio and Demi Moore fall on this date, demand over recent years suggest it Singles’ Day is the event that’s going to break the internet.
Since Singles’ Day is the antidote to Valentine’s Day, the purchases tend to be luxurious gifts – for them, the gifts are their ‘match’.
