If you’re feeling especially gloomy today, you’re not alone. Today is Blue Monday, officially the most depressing day of the year!
Originally coined Blue Monday by a holiday company in 2005, it’s thought the third Monday in January has earned this ominous title due to the culmination of post-Christmas blues, cold winter nights and the arrival of outstanding credit card bills.
Research conducted by the Priory Group supports today’s dark title further, finding the word ‘depression’ was googled once every two seconds on Blue Monday last year – closely followed by ‘stressed’ with 22 searches per minute and ‘anxiety’ 21 times per minute. The University of Exeter have gone one step further and quantified the impact of the nation’s glumness, predicting businesses could be set to lose as much as £93 billion in lost employee productivity.
It’s safe to say that the UK could really do with a little cheering up today and what better way for brands to earn a greater share of people’s lives than to help banish some of their consumer’s blues? Last year celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall donated some winter-warmer recipes to the charity ‘Spark and Mettle’ to help brighten up Blue Monday dinner time, ultimately gaining awareness and warmth towards the charity. Also, with #BlueMonday trending on Twitter it wasn’t surprising that brands turned to the social platform in the attempt to spread some cheer. The Drum has compiled a set of last year’s posts and it’s quickly apparent that a stock cute kitten/puppy pic is the default option for the majority – but is this really enough to cheer people up?
At OMD UK we have applied a little more innovation and scale, taking over a taxi rank with a competition to win a chauffeur driven car home with a hamper of lovely goodies for our Celebrity Cruises client … screw the cute kittens, that would really banish my blues!
