International Friendship Day was started in the United States by none other than Hallmark when their intelligence team got together and realized that their biggest holiday lull came exactly on August 2nd. How could they possibly sell greeting cards when the next biggest holiday was Halloween, which was more than 2 months away? Alas, they came up with Friendship Day: a day where people could celebrate the friends in their lives. Awww! This holiday would be surely loved and universal. Don't we all have friends? Wouldn't we love it if Hallmark helped us write them friendship poems and delighted us with friendship quotes? The answer was a resounding yes. Except not how'd you expect. The holiday has failed to capture Americans but has become huge and vastly celebrated in South America and Asia. Some countries celebrate the holiday with the same enthusiasm we reserve for Valentines Day and Mother's Day. It has inspired advertisers in these countries to come up with unique ideas to sell more product. +Castro, an advertising agency in Argentina, decided to capitalize on the holiday for their client Todomoda. Using twitter, they drove troves of teenage girls to their stores by proclaiming that "real friends share everything." And they meant everything. The company designed a new kind of tweet where one user composed the first half and then invited one of their friends to write the second half. When the tweet was completed, it was simultaneously broadcast onto both user's feeds. Girls received instant discounts and prizes when they shared a tweet with a friend. They also used the platform to play games and answer trivia questions. The idea worked magic for the store. Shared tweets were seen by more than 500,000 users! Even celebrities became involved when Todomoda encouraged girls to ask the likes of Nicki Minaj and other huge names to share a tweet with them. International Friendship Day has definitely helped international stores improve their numbers for the slow month of August. So why hasn't the holiday made it big in the U.S.? Do South Americans love their friends more than we do? Are Americans just turned off by obvious marketing ploys? Even if the holiday hasn't officially taken off, Americans have been increasingly searching Google for "Friendship Day" every year, with 2012 seeing a very notable increase. Maybe we will come to love and celebrate this holiday eventually and Hallmark can finally breathe easy when August rolls around.
I leave you with a friendship quote:
"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
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