Amazon Prime Day brings trend of manufacturing holidays into mobile-app era

Amazon Prime Day brings trend of manufacturing holidays into mobile-app era

SAN FRANCISCO — Amazon's Prime Day is the latest holiday to be ginned up for the purposes of selling goods, extending a trend that includes Black Friday, Cyber Monday and, more recently, Alibaba's $14.3 billion Singles' Day.
To become the kind of tradition that gets printed on calendars and factors into sales forecasts, however, it will need to become bigger than Amazon. And maybe change its name.

“Amazon has a stake in wanting this to become a holiday, but so do the other retailers. Not that Walmart or Best Buy would say publicly ‘We love Amazon Prime Day,' but the fact is they had deals to compete with the Amazon deals and they sold a lot,” said Melissa Arnoff, a marketing expert with public relations firm Levick inWashington, D.C.
Consumers have shown that when there's a deal to be had, the cultural, historic or religious hooks can be tenuous — if there at all. That's certainly the case for Prime Day, set in July, a month of doldrums for retail that's insulated from any major gift-giving holidays.
Amazon's shopping deals, which were open only to the 44 million Prime members it is estimated to have had on its first Prime Day last year were snatched up by customers. Despite complaints on social media about the type of goods on discount, Amazon managed to get orders for 34.4 million items worldwide, breaking its Black Friday sales records and pushing multiple other retailers to follow its lead.


It's not clear, however, if Prime Day will morph into a Black Friday in July or another shopping hallmark that quickly becomes "tradition," even if it's less than 30 years old.
“For it to catch on as a really cultural phenomenon, as opposed to an economic success, there needs to be an emotional component,” said Arnoff.
Take Mother's Day.
Originally launched by West Virginian Anna Jarvis in 1908 to honor mothers, by 1911 it was being observed across the country. By the 1920s, the day had become a major selling point for greeting-card manufacturers, candy makers and florists.
In fact, Jarvis was appalled at the commercialization of what she saw as a sacred day and went on to spend much of the rest of her life fighting what it had become.
Another example is Black Friday. It may seem as if its origins go back to the mists of time, but it actually wasn't a part of the national conversation until the late 1980s.
It started in 1960s Philadelphia, when Philadelphia Bulletin reporter Joseph Barrett recirculated the police department's use of the term to describe the terrible gridlock caused by hordes of people coming into town on the day after Thanksgiving to attend the annual Army-Navy football game and to shop downtown.
But it didn't become a national shopping phenomenon until the late 1980s, when it was recast as the day retailers' accounts "went into the black" after losing money all year, due to strong pre-Christmas sales.
Of even more recent origin is Cyber Monday, first coined in 2005 by Ellen Davis of the National Retail Federation.
It began in the early 2000s, when online shopping was still new and most consumers didn’t have Internet access at home. After shopping in brick-and-mortar stores on Black Friday, they couldn't do any online buying until they came back to work on Monday where they had access to computers and high-speed Internet connections.

                    

SINGLES' DAY

The epitome of this trend is the Chinese buying frenzy called Singles' Day, which takes place on Nov. 11.

It began as a low-key event among university students in Nanjing in the 1990s, a day for bachelors to gather with friends and meet new people. The date, 11-11, was chosen because it's a grouping of 1's, or singles.

Said by some to have been one of the spurs that pushed Amazon to create Prime Day, Singles' Day was launched by Alibaba in 2009. The Chinese Web giant rebranded it as Singles' Day, when unmarried people could buy things they wanted for themselves.

Less than a decade later, it's become a huge cultural event in China and across Asia. Last year it began with a gala opening in Beijing and a huge, star-studded variety show broadcast on nationwide TV. Alibaba made a record $14.3 billion in sales on Singles' Day, breaking its previous record and blowing past its estimates of $11 billion in sales.

AMAZON: IT'S ABOUT SMALL BUSINESSES

A year in, Amazon sees Prime Day as not just a shopping holiday that will fill its coffers, but one that gives some needed oomph to the thousands of small businesses who sell via Amazon.
"A peak sales day in the summer, similar to a peak day during the holiday season, means the opportunity for growth for these businesses as Prime Day helps introduce their products to millions of new customers. It provides the opportunity for entrepreneurs to fuel their passion of growing their business while also delighting Prime members," said Greg Greeley, Amazon's vice president for Prime.

When Amazon launched Prime Day in 2015, a handful of other retailers added their own sales, hoping to catch some of the event's slipstream.
In 2016, many more are doing so. So much so that Levick's Arnoff wonders if eventually the holiday will get rebranded once again.
Already other retailers are coming up with a new name for the shopping event that leaves Amazon out of the loop.
The most popular so far seems to be “Black Friday July,” said Howard Schaffer, general manager of Offers.com.
“Obviously ‘Black Friday’ means discount to people,” so it’s a good workaround, he said.

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