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CORPORATE HOLIDAYS
Some holiday celebrations date back for centuries, and because they are so widely observed, they make tempting targets for greedy businesses, eager to sell their products. Other “traditions” have actually been invented by greedy corporations and are not at all ancient.
Moon Festival barbecues in Taiwan and KFC for Christmas in Japan are two of the first type of traditions, while White Day and November 11 (11-11), celebrated big-time throughout Asia, are perfectly modern examples of inventive corporate greed.
Traditionally, the Mid-Autumn, or Moon, Festival has been an age-old holiday celebrated with family dinners, mooncakes, and pomelos but not with barbecues. Those have only been a necessary part of the tradition since 1986, when two enterprising Taiwan food companies staged an advertising campaign, pushing their barbecue sauces as must-have additions to any self-respecting holiday gathering. The current generation may picture their ancestors viewing the full moon through the smoke from their barbecue grills, but that would be a serious anachronism, since barbecuing at Moon Festival is not yet even a 50-year-old custom. Ask your Grandma.
Another modern “ancient” holiday tradition is KFC for Christmas in Japan. In 1974, the American fried-chicken company KFC launched an advertising push to inspire a new and, of course, very profitable eating habit around Christmastime for the Japanese. Foreigners in Japan always have a hard time finding turkeys for their Christmas dinners and often turn to an easy substitute, a bucket of fried chicken parts from KFC, which was already well-established in Japan. Locals, observing the foreigners and wanting to adopt Western Christmas traditions, assumed that KFC for Christmas was an honored Western tradition like gifts and Santa.
The company was only too glad to encourage the misunderstanding with expensive TV ads, and now, no Christmas in Japan is complete without fried chicken. And, not so surprisingly, Christmas has become one of the biggest sales days each year for KFC. It has become so big that chicken buckets must be reserved weeks in advance to avoid disappointment.
A triumph for actual corporate holiday invention dates from about the same period. In 1978, Japanese candy companies were looking to extend their holiday sales success from chocolates on February 14. Valentine’s Day was already a profitable Western holiday ever since it had been transplanted to Japan in the 1950s. This time, the candy executives cleverly contrived a reciprocal celebration, one month later on March 14, which they called White Day.
Their thinking was that men usually gave chocolates to their girlfriends on Valentine’s Day, so why not pressure women to return the favor a month later with gifts of white chocolate for boyfriends. Whoever first came up with that scheme should have gotten a nice, big bonus. Needless to say, White Day became a hit and has been part of the corporate holiday calendar ever since, because it neatly taps into the Japanese cultural tradition of giving reciprocal gifts. Genius marketing.
Each of these three masterful sales campaigns capitalized on existing holidays, but the most successful, by far, of all original business creations is Singles Day (11-11), celebrated each year on November 11. It is the newest of them and never existed at all until Mainland college students, at Nanjing University, chose the day to buy themselves gifts—as a joke—in honor of being single.
Of course, corporate interests knew a good thing when they saw it, so they shamelessly hijacked the campus joke holiday and pushed it on all single people everywhere as a day when they should spend lavishly to treat themselves to expensive gifts. Today, Singles Day has spread throughout Asia and beyond, and it has become the “single” biggest holiday in the whole world, in terms of spending—USD$139 billion last year—far bigger than any holiday in the West.
So, before you get too sentimental about any holiday, you might want to do a little research. Some of them are the products of very unsentimental, calculating, greedy business interests. Happy Holidays?
A P/J (PETE/JACK) PRODUCTION
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