The goal for any company’s marketing is to make a day on the calendar become a special holiday. Two big successes are Star Wars Day (May 4th) in the US and Pepero Day (November 11th) in Korea. They became special for different reasons.
Star Wars Day works because of a sound trick. The date May the Fourth sounds like the famous phrase, “May the Force be with you.” For business, Star Wars Day is a broad sales event. Many companies give cheaper prices on any product with the Star Wars name. The day is like a Black Friday, driving sales across many different products and companies.
Pepero Day is different. The date 11/11 was chosen because the long, thin Pepero sticks look exactly like the number ‘1’. The whole holiday is built on this visual match.
Pepero Day is strongly connected to one company, Lotte Confectionery. The day’s goal is to make people buy and give away Pepero. It lets people show love or give a gift easily. This helps people overcome social rules and drives high sales for only Lotte.
Pepero Day is a smarter success because it targets social desires to sell its own product more, while Star Wars Day is a simpler discount celebration for many companies.
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Reference
Zane, D. M., Reczek, R. W., & Haws, K. L. (2022). Promoting Pi Day: Consumer Response to Special Day-Themed Sales Promotions. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 32(4), 652–663. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1271
Many firms now link discounts to “special days”—novel holidays/events not historically associated with promotions (e.g., Pi Day). Using a field study and laboratory studies, we explore consumers’ responses to special day-themed sales promotions. Specifically, we demonstrate that consumers respond more favorably to a discount celebrating a special day compared to the same discount with no link to the special day. Further, we show that consumers’ increased intentions to use special day-themed discounts are driven by their perceptions of the marketer’s creativity (both the originality and appropriateness dimensions) through a marketplace metacognition process. Thus, when a given special day-themed discount becomes commonplace in the marketplace (i.e., originality is low) or when there is low fit between the firm and special day (i.e., appropriateness is low), special day-themed promotions are no more effective than more traditional types of one-day sales. Finally, we develop a typology of special day-themed sales promotions and offer avenues for future research on how consumers respond to such promotional efforts.
This post presents two successful marketing strategies used by companies to leverage ‘specific dates.’ The Star Wars Day marketing focuses on broad discounts (akin to Black Friday) through a phonetic connection, thereby boosting sales volume. In contrast, Pepero Day marketing utilizes the visual form match between the product and the date to target social desires (gift-giving), maximizing the sales of a single company’s specific product. The two strategies have different strengths: large-scale deal attraction and the precise linking of product and date.
Growing up in Korea, I constantly heard adults dismiss Pepero Day as mere “commercialism.” However, I have always believed that few marketing campaigns achieve such a perfect harmony of timing, product form, and social strategy.
I believe that Star Wars-style marketing is efficient for revenue growth but lacks depth in brand loyalty or customer experience, while Pepero-style marketing is sophisticated and deep but limited in scale. Therefore, I concluded that a hybrid strategy combining the strengths of both is necessary for the most powerful and sustainable marketing performance.
According to the study presented, consumers react more positively to holiday-themed discounts than to unrelated identical discounts, and this reaction is driven by the perceived creativity of the marketer. This means the core of a successful hybrid strategy lies in the marketer’s ability to create an idea that is both original and appropriate, combining the advantages of both strategies.
Olive Young, a health and beauty store, currently achieves Star Wars-style success through the ‘Oll Young Sale’ (Black Friday style), but it lacks the sophisticated date-based marketing of Pepero Day, which links the brand itself to a specific date.
Therefore, I conceptualized a Pepero Day marketing strategy unique to Olive Young. This is the ‘Oll+Young Day’ on January 1st. It combines the visual form of the date (1/1) with the New Year resolution: ‘Everyone aged up, but let’s start the new year Young.’
On this day, Olive Young can implement the hybrid strategy by offering large-scale discounts (Star Wars strategy) on ‘Inner Beauty/Anti-aging products’ for ‘Young-ness,’ while simultaneously creating a social act where purchasing customers gift the product to each other with the message, “May you grow younger this year!”
The combination of the sales volume attraction secured by the Star Wars strategy and the precise brand-date linkage of Pepero Day could generate powerful synergy for Olive Young. For this hybrid strategy to succeed, marketers must continuously develop ideas that are both original and appropriate to the company’s business area. This is the only way to avoid the research finding that the effectiveness of holiday marketing diminishes when the market becomes saturated or the fit becomes low.
https://global.oliveyoung.com/