In the evening, I came across an interesting ad by pfizer. The ad is relevant to this V-week and speaks a lot about the consumer spending habit. According to National Retail Federation(NRF) the Americans plan to spending approx $21.8 billion in 2021 on V-Day, making it the fifth largest spending event in US. Though in rough times of Wuhan virus people aren’t cutting back much on spending. It’s the second largest amount since the year 2009, when NRF started tracking the spending. The largest amount on V-Day was spent last year to the tune of $27.4 billion.
How’s the spending habit in India?
According to a report of ASSOCHAM, Indians spend 16K crore on V-week in 2014 and 22K crore in 2015, a tremendous 40% growth. The data is half a decade old. By now even if we take a CAGR of 20%, given the rising of the like of e-commerce giants, the week would have been grown to 51K Cr, more than half the amount the government will be spending on education sector in the financial year 2021-22.
The symbol of love has been a blessing for the framers. According to Indian Society of Floriculture Professionals (ISFP) in 2017 India exported Rose worth of ₹17 Cr were exported for V-Week celebration and ₹27-30 Cr in 2019. Even Cadbury brings limited editions Valentine chocolates to global markets for years to lure chocolate lovers.
But how and when did Valentine celebration come to India? It came just after the economic liberalisation in the 90’s. The middle class people emerged in watching foreign channels where the foreign companies bombarded ads to celebrate love so that they can churn more profit by selling more products to us. There is other side of the story too. In 2015, after couple of years of experiment, the state of Chhattisgarh officially declared 14 February every year to be Parents’ Day or Matru-Pitru Divas.
Anyways hope you had an amazing V-week and you contributed in making the richer more rich 😀
Until then…
Igniting Curiosity.. 