Sell LOVE, not Valentine's Day

It's no secret; great copywriting is now reserved for novels, TV shows, and movies. Ads got put on the backburner and relegated to things like "Take Advantage of Our 40% OFF Valentine's Day Special" to sell fitness programs, books, business coaching, energy drinks, gum, and a whole host of things that have nothing to do with Valentine's Day.

Think about that for a second. What does 40% off have to do with love? Nothing. It's a coupon wearing a red bow, and your customer knows it. You didn't write an ad, you wrote a price tag with a heart sticker slapped on it.

If everyone else's copywriting is doing this, why is yours?

The Discount Is Lazy. Love Isn't.

Discounting is what you do when you've got nothing else to say. It's the copywriting equivalent of shrugging. Anybody can knock 40% off a price — your intern could do that in five minutes without ever touching a keyboard. What your intern can't do is make somebody feel something.

And feeling something is the whole game. Nobody buys gum because it's 40% off in February. They buy it because somewhere in the back of their head, there's a story about a first date, a job interview, a moment they wanted to feel a little more confident. That's the door in. The discount just stands outside knocking on the wrong house.

Don't "discount" Valentine's Day. Instead, sell LOVE. Tell a love story and tie your product or service into it.

What That Actually Looks Like

I'm not talking about slapping a heart emoji on your logo and calling it a day. I mean an actual story, with an actual person in it, who wants an actual thing.

Say you sell energy drinks. You could run "40% Off This Valentine's Day" — or you could write about the guy pulling a double shift so he can afford to take his wife somewhere nice, and the can that gets him through hour eleven. Say you sell business coaching. You could discount it — or you could write about the woman who started her company so she'd stop missing her kids' recitals, and how she's finally keeping that promise to herself. Same product. Completely different ad. One of them a stranger scrolls past. The other one a stranger feels.

That's the difference between advertising and noise. And it starts before you've written a single line of body copy — it starts with the headline that earns the read, because none of this story matters if nobody gets past the first five words.

People Still Love a Discount — Just Not Instead of Everything Else

Yes, people love discounts. I'm not telling you to bury the offer or pretend price doesn't matter — of course it does. But what people love more than discounts is being treated like people. Give them the story first, the humanity first, the reason to care first. The discount can ride along in the back seat. It just doesn't get to drive.

Here's the test: if you deleted "Valentine's Day" from your ad and swapped in "Presidents' Day" or "back-to-school," would anything actually change? If the answer's no, you didn't write a Valentine's Day ad. You wrote a discount with a costume on.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

This isn't just a February problem. It's every holiday, every "seasonal push," every time a calendar date becomes an excuse to slash a price instead of an excuse to say something true about your customer's life. Christmas, Mother's Day, Black Friday — same trap, different wrapping paper. The brands that win those calendar moments aren't the ones with the deepest discount. They're the ones who understood what the day actually means to the person reading the ad.

Valentine's Day means something. It's love, longing, gratitude, second chances, the guy who's still nervous asking her out after eleven years married. That's rich material. That's a gift sitting right in front of you. Don't trade it in for a coupon code.

Write the love story. Let the product show up inside it, not standing next to it holding a sign that says 40% OFF. And if you're not sure the story's landing, run it through the same filter I use on every headline I write: would a stranger stop scrolling and feel something, or just scroll past a headline doing 80% of the work it never earned?