Retail marketing inspiration this Halloween
The UK Halloween interest has grown to be the country’s 3rd most prominent retail event! With the holiday becoming an expanding opportunity across all industries, we thought exploring the best retail marketing strategies out there would be relevant. Read on to take a look at how you can take advantage of this year’s spooky season with the best retail marketing inspiration this Halloween.
Read the below Snapshot blog post to find some retail marketing inspiration this Halloween
The Halloween Retail Market
The commercialised version of Halloween has exponentially infiltrated the UK from the US. With a £687 million forecast to be spent this year, an upsurge of £151 million since 2021. In fact, despite the pandemic, Halloween sales have grown since 2013, making the spooky season an invaluable opportunity for retailers.
The fashion and beauty industry has had tremendous sales due to pop culture, social media, and the public’s exposure to influencers and celebs. Since the mid-twentieth century, Halloween costumes have become a fashion statement. Kim K, Harry Styles and your favourite Bridgeton character challenge traditional ideas of chilling black cats and zombie brides. This means that shoppers are looking for fashion-focused products instead of typical polyester one-use costumes. Trendy Halloween items further perpetuate fast fashion choices. An estimated 39 million Brits dress up in new costumes each year, despite the raised eyebrows of sustainability concerns.
ASOS Alter Ego
Halloween is a crucial social media magnifier for brands, where customers and influencers showcase their talent for turning themselves into skeletons, zombies, and ghouls. TikTok is an exceptionally efficient tool for creating trends to celebrate and promote a holiday period, meanwhile increasing brand awareness.
The ASOS alter ego challenge asked participants to dress up as their Halloween ‘alter ego’ along with ASOS’ sound and video effects. Participants could submit their videos to ASOS’ branded mission, boosting their videos for free, a lucrative feature for accounts wishing to grow. With 839 million video views in the UK alone, 283,000 creators took part, including some of the most established creators like @jonysios and @challxn, verifying the campaign’s success.
NYX - Haunted Dollhouse
NYX also took to TikTok and inspired a similar challenge to create beauty looks using the brands' products and the hashtag #DOLLHOUSECHALLENGE. The challenge meant turning yourself into a disturbing doll, finishing with NYX's signature matte setting spray, ending in the hashtag being well used over 650,000 times.
It's not only the fashion and beauty sectors taking advantage of the Spooky Season.
It hasn’t just been creepy costumes, consumer electronics, decorations, pumpkins, and sweet treats fuelling profits. Everyday brands have been taking marketing campaigns to the next level of imagination for the supernatural season.
Heinz – Tomato Blood
Halloween is a critical time for companies to share a peek into their dark side, generally with humour-filled ads carefully curated. Last year, Heinz launched Tomato Blood for a limited time only. With the tagline “If you have Heinz, you have a costume”. The brand relates the use of ketchup as fake blood for Halloween pranks and costumes.
The brand even brought out pre-made outfits and branded kits for consumers to create their own terrifying looks. The kit included a bottle of ketchup, a makeup palette and brush set, sponge, rhinestone sheet, tattoo sheet, vampire teeth, and ‘spooky’ fake eyelashes. Despite some speculation that this was a scarily realistic prank, considering a post on TikTok only offered a chance to win 1 of 570 bottles of ketchup, enough content was created to conclude with 3.1 billion views!
Fanta
Also interpreting social media, Fanta characterised each flavoured can with an associating filter on Snapchat unlocked via a QR code. As a result, they saw a growth of 23% during Halloween and a 12% value growth and contributed an extra £69 million of soft drinks sales.
As a result, this year, shoppers are invited to scan QR codes with the added incentive of winning prizes from a £50k prize pool ranging from entertainment systems, cauldrons of cash, and the ultimate scary night in. Those who don’t win a prize will receive exclusive digital content to scare their friends and family.
Netflix & Chills
Speaking of the ultimate scary movie night in, for adults who have outgrown trick-or-treating, cosying in on the sofa to watch a hair-raising horror is the perfect evening. Each year, Netflix creates peculiar infographics with exclusive movie releases and helps decide what film to watch depending on how scared they want to be. Films are ranked on realism, scare-factor, and supernaturality levels for a month-long fright fest. As a result, #NetflixandChills appeared on nearly 8,000 Instagram posts with almost 600,000 views on TikTok.
Marmite
The love-hate spread played on its controversial popularity by labelling their jars as “trick” or “treat”. They also sold the personalised jars as gifts for £9.99 online, openly marking up the price for a personalised sticker. Get yours here
Skittle Zombies
The slightly sadistic concept of hiding a rotten zombie flavour in a bag of sweets has been a big hit. Welcomingly accepted by consumers, Skittle’s fans relish the brand’s profanity and sense of humour. The launch was also accompanied by a new marketing effort on social media with the hashtag #DareTheRainbow. This new hashtag mention has been aimed to encourage consumers to record their experiences as they divulge the gross treat and capture their reactions.
To conclude
It is clear that when it comes to Halloween that experimental, strange and humorous campaigns are the ones that achieve the most traction. Especially involving social media channels to boost profiles. We hope that you've been inspired by our retail marketing inspiration for Halloween. Hopefully, you can make use of some of these as a source of inspiration.
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