Digital Valentine, Anybody?

The holidays are behind us and next up, it’s St. Valentine’s Day. This is the point at which lovers everywhere head for the greeting card shops to buy a (largely unwanted) card, which usually has some kind of red heart on it, accompanied by either a sentimental or bawdy message.

For retailers in Europe and, for some reason, particularly the U.K., it’s a small turnover spike in a period that is traditionally something of a sales drought. It also bridges that awkward space between the onset of New Year and the arrival of the Easter Bunny. And curiously, a quick shimmy round the big VM agencies reveals one mildly surprising fact: hearts, corny messages and arrow-shooting Cupids might only play a minor role in this year’s array of themed windows.

In fairness, budgets for Valentine’s Day are modest, owing perhaps to the fact that it’s just one day, and therefore, most of the displays are set to be a good idea cleverly executed, rather than any kind of Cecil B. DeMille production.

What’s interesting, however, is the LEDs and neon features in many of the plans that are in place, and if nothing else, 2015 looks like the year in which most purveyors of Valentine’s will embrace digital designs as a potentially low(er) cost way of getting the “sweetheart” message across.

All this at a time when in-store customer-facing tech – as a means of entertainment – seems to be beating something of a retreat, with attention being paid instead to its use as a means of making shopping easier. It may be that when we reach the end of the next 12 months, we’ll look back and say that digital moved into store windows and away from interiors. That’s the current view this side of the Pond … but then again, nothing is set in stone this early in the year.

John Ryan is a journalist covering the retail sector, a role he has fulfilled for more than a decade. As well as being the European Editor of VMSD magazine, he writes for a broad range of publications in the U.K., the U.S. and Germany with a focus on in-store marketing, display and layout, as well as the business of store architecture and design. In a previous life, he was a buyer for C&A based in London and then Dusseldorf. He lives and works in London.