Blue Monday has become a regular feature in marketing calendars, with thousands of brands jumping on the trend every year. With COVID lockdowns raising concerns about mental health, the current flurry of “Blue Monday” and “the most depressing day of the year” mentions in the media and online might seem, on the surface, particularly poignant. The reality, however, is not quite what it seems. It’s all about perception.
The modern use of the phrase Blue Monday originated in a 2005 press release by Sky Travel, which claimed the third Monday of January was the most depressing day of the year. The phrase itself, however, dates back much further.
The term Blue Monday first appeared in literature nearly 200 years ago, in the 1830s, referring to the hungover state of workers who were paid on Saturday and spent that night and Sunday (after church, of course) getting drunk.
Today, Monday is seen as the start of the working week. In the early 19th century, though, a rolling seven-day working week was common. Workers often did not turn up on Monday, citing “Saint Monday” when suffering from a hangover after Sunday’s drinking.
Days off work were rare at the time. Sunday, the Christian Sabbath, was often the only day off, but “weekends” as we know them did not exist until the 19th century. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of the term weekend to 1879, in the British magazine Notes and Queries. Before that, the entire concept of a weekend, and therefore returning to work after the weekend, simply did not exist.
In the north of Britain during the early 19th century, the Industrial Revolution began to standardise processes and labour practices to increase efficiency. The modern concept of a weekend grew from this standardisation, as a voluntary arrangement between factory owners and workers. Worker activism later led to the widespread acceptance of a “half-day Saturday” by the early 20th century, but the full two-day weekend, with both Saturday and Sunday off, was not widely established until the 1930s.
Over time, the weekend came to start on Friday after work, moving the peak of drinking back a day so workers would not arrive at work on a blue Monday with a hangover.
Since then, the term Blue Monday has been repeatedly repurposed and appears regularly in marketing and popular culture with different meanings.
In the 1950s in the USA, Blue Monday referred to laundry day and was used in detergent advertising. The author Kurt Vonnegut mentioned it in his 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions, subtitled Goodbye Blue Monday.
And, of course, there is the classic New Order track.
The modern use of Blue Monday as “the most depressing day of the year” began as a publicity stunt to boost post-Christmas holiday sales. It was never meant to be taken seriously. It happened to be a slow news week, and the claim was widely reported by the national press as if it were scientific fact. In reality, it was a back-of-an-envelope calculation based on flawed data and a lot of assumption. The claim has been debunked many times but remains popular, with many people unaware of its lack of credibility.
Despite having no basis in scientific fact, the modern understanding of Blue Monday has become firmly embedded in the folklore of contemporary marketing.
Narrative Industries is an eCommerce agency, with a focus on consumer behaviour.