What you can learn about people from studying their holiday cards
Holiday cards are a delightful seasonal indulgence. As a highly curated snapshot of your life, they’re a more traditional status update in an increasingly digital world. But one company that sells holiday cards has done something intriguingly modern with those lovingly decorated dispatches.
Minted, a San Francisco-based company that prints holiday cards using crowdsourced art from creators, has analyzed millions of its customers’ orders in aggregate over the years. Minted doesn’t sell its data to third parties, including marketers, nor does it publicly share customers’ personal information, but its terms of service acknowledge that it may perform data analysis to improve its products and services, and there is no way for customers to opt out. The content, however, is anonymized before Minted uses a form of analysis known as structured query language to scan the text that appears on cards. That leads to insights like which type of family pet gets more mentions. Surprisingly, cats were the victors in 2021. The company also reviews sales numbers and conducts focus groups to learn more about choices like color combination, how photos are staged, and what people wear.
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This year, Minted mined the aggregate text of 300,000 cards, produced by customers between October and December 2021. The massive sample yielded fascinating insights about the national American mood at a time when it’s easy to assume the worst thanks to pandemic confusion and polarization. Minted founder and co-CEO Mariam Naficy told me that by early December, prior to widespread Omicron outbreaks, the dominant mood for holiday cards felt lighter than last year.
Before digging into what Minted found, it’s worth pausing to consider how nearly every online experience — even your cherished holiday card — ultimately produces valuable corporate data. People know this intuitively. At some point, we thought about how Google shares aspects of our Gmail data with advertisers, or how Facebook’s algorithms know our browsing history, and decided it was worth trading away some privacy for the convenience of using the technology.
Naficy says that Minted analyzes cards because it yields data that helps the company identify emerging trends before they go mainstream as well as predict what customers will crave months before it reaches their consciousness. In general, Minted’s use of data analysis helped it anticipate the llama craze well before it showed up in the mass marketplace.
What Minted found this year is indeed telling, if not unsurprising. Between October and December, largely before Omicron emerged, customers used the word “finally” 73 percent more than they did in 2020. Messages that referenced Netflix, masking, and social distancing decreased significantly. People couldn’t quite embrace typing “normal,” but at least they tried — mentions increased by 12 percent. Also on the upswing were mentions of “flight,” “plane,” “hotel,” and “airbnb,” as well as “reunion” and “reunited.” Minted read these verbal trends as evidence that people are less interested in acknowledging the COVID-19 lockdown on their cards compared to last year, even as the virus itself persists. In 2021, Minted found its customers gravitating back toward the traditional, complete with staged poses and matching outfits. It seems one holiday season of pandemic jokes and Zoom collages was all that most people could bear.