Archive for September, 2011

Halloween Costumes – A Branding Opportunity

In the Halloween Costumes industry there has been a recent fascinating development that should make all marketeers stop dead in the tracks. It’s become a real game changer this year. Companies who have developed characters, cartoon or otherwise, to use in the TV and marketing campaigns are starting to awaken to the new social economy. By Licensing their costumes to be manufactured and sold to loyal customers who love their marketing / brand so much that they are willing to pay to dress up and represent their brand for the night, they have living social endorsement. This is the kind of marketing that we as the business community spend hundreds of thousands trying to achieve and mean while there is a queue of people, willing and ready with cash in hand to pay for the pleasure in promoting your brand.

Now the arguments are vast why many brands will turn down the opportunity of this new form of customer engagement, what if The Burger King was to be photographed eating in McDonalds or The Honey Monster was to make a wholly show of himself on the dance floor doing a funky chicken impersonation. To me this is yesteryear thinking and trying to control the conversation. People are smart enough to know it’s the guy in the suit who can’t dance and either way, the brands just given them a bit of a laugh and will be at the forefront of their mind for the next few days.

The Juxtaposition of customers adopting brands that represent them in their Halloween Costumes isn’t suitable to every brand, but if you have a brand with a character it could be massive untapped potential. Certainly for a new brand wanting to make a splash and that has a decent TV and Billboard budget, it’s worth considering should you create a character with this as part of your strategy. At the moment my industry is actually paying the brands to license their characters, however I expect come next year the tables may turn and they will infact be aggressively encouraging it.