Market Analysis

A Massive Industry Crossing the boundaries of the personal and the professional, even the sacred and the commercial, greeting cards continue to play a prominent role in modern social America. Each year, more than 6.5 billion cards are purchased, the sales totaling between $7 and $8 billion. Purchasing is ubiquitous across households—nine out of 10—and generations, with millennial buyers spending more on cards than the baby boomer generation, though baby boomers purchase more by volume. While birthday cards make up over half of the total cards purchased, Christmas cards make up the largest seasonal segment at upwards of 1.6 billion units purchased annually, followed by a distant 145 million cards for Valentine’s Day.vii According to the US Postal Service, while personal letter and invitation mailing has declined in recent years, total holiday greeting card units sent have been on the rise, increasing 3.8% between 2016 and 2018.viii Amidst these stacks of personally sent cards are masses of cards also sent by businesses, seeing the potential in the medium. Yet so little is known about such professional uses of greeting cards. This study offers foundational knowledge on greeting cards as business communication media and artifact. This white paper presents data from a nationwide study, with analysis propelled by existing literature on personal greeting cards and professional assessments of direct mailers.

Greeting Cards as Meaningful Objects It is little surprise to find that greeting cards retain deeply personal potential as a medium, given that their very design is often based on an open space that encourages senders to pen their own unique message. As reported by the Greeting Card Association, “75% of consumers who send holiday cards say they do so because they know how good it feels when they receive a holiday greeting.”This meaningfulness is historically situated, with cards as objects functioning in nuanced ways in different contexts.

Current card practices draw on various historical eras, including for example the Victorian tradition of viewing cards as an opportunity to bring aesthetic beauty into middle-class domestic spaces x or the mid-century development of exclusive licensing agreements to adorn greeting card companies with pop culture characters.Greeting card creators are successful, Barry Shank argues, when they “speak the emotional truth of the mainstream American culture,” allowing the sender to create an emotional connection with the recipient.

As Emily West has explained, this is “75% of consumers who send holiday cards say they do so because they know how good it feels when they receive a holiday greeting.”

Previous research quite the feat for the card manufacturers, given the irony of mass-producing objects that generate idiosyncratic personal sentimental connections. Of course, who sends them and when is determined by a sometimes murky set of social norms, such as whether one should or should not send a card based on whether sender A received a card from potential recipient B the previous year, especially if potential recipient B is higher status than A and did in fact send a card the previous year.