Only 365 Shopping Days to Halloween

Halloween – it’s the new Christmas!  This year the supermarkets have made an art form of the stretching of an inconsequential one-day event into an everlasting sales extravaganza.  I can’t remember when my local Tesco DIDN’T have a dedicated orange-and-black Halloween aisle.

 As I sit now and type (October 31, 4.45pm) in the relative safety of the screened-off instore café, the cries and clatters of a minor pitched battle reverberate around the rafters, as grown men and women jostle and joust over the last remaining sets of glow-in-the-dark bones, and inflatable grim reaper costumes.  Staff dressed like characters from 'Hunchback' frantically mark down packets of pumpkin cutlery, and pile up bags of trick-or-treat-size chocolates. A spotty youth in a plastic witch's hat just served my tea and chip roll.

Do marketers dictate what we buy, or simply reflect consumer demand?  If it’s the former, then right now I’m embarrassed to be in the business.  If it’s the latter, I’m embarrassed to be British!  I’ve never seen such a junk-fest as the stuff that’s been pedalled over the past few weeks, masquerading as must-have-accessories for your kids.  And – groan! – we’re lapping it up.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m right there with the argument that enterprise creates jobs and wealth, but for me it’s all gone cuckoo.  Just think how many thousands of tons of flashing devils’ tails and leering werewolf masks will be heading for landfill tomorrow morning - not to mention the packaging.  How can we argue we don’t deserve to get copped for ‘pay as you throw’?

Call me a traditionalist, but back in the old days Halloween was allowed to creep up on the unsuspecting public in the form of a knock on the front door and the sound of scurrying footsteps retreating into the darkness.  Now it’s a full-fancy-dress floorshow, payment obligatory, no concessions.  I blame the Scots.  (They surely invented it.)

I’ll be intrigued to discover whether the Halloween aisle metamorphoses overnight into the Christmas aisle – or is Yuletide simply just too imminent to be worth promoting?  After all, only 54 shopping days left to Christmas.  Halloween, meanwhile, has a full year’s worth of sales to be gleaned.  (And – yes – deliberate mistake: 366 days!)

Wispa...Wispa

The onion is the single most important cooking ingredient in the world, yet not a great seller from the confectionery fixture. The return of Cadbury’s 80s icon Wispa reminds me of the secret for everlasting sales, and – equally – why you shouldn’t be shy about blatant short-termism in marketing.
Hunting for a scalpel last week I happened across a half-concealed stack of Cadbury’s Wispa boxes in our store-cupboard. Usually this kind of discovery means we’re doing some co-promotion or other, but – no – it was just a straight case of chocolate addiction. Evidently our gaggle of gannets had stripped Princes Street of supplies, and were now obliged to forage further afield – hence the cash & carry packs. It seems new ‘old’ Wispa is going like a train!

Remember the original Wispa craze? You perhaps don’t – at least not the national feeding frenzy it fomented in the early 1980s – and the shockwaves sent crashing through the confectionery market when it looked like Cadbury had finally conjured up a countline to challenge Mars Bar and Kit-Kat.

Actually, Cadbury should have known better than to count their chickens (and I speak as someone who worked at Bournville as a marketer at the time). We’d already discovered we could shift more Crème Eggs in the 3-4 months between Christmas and Easter than by having them on permanent year-round sale… so the writing for Wispa was arguably already on the wall.

It’s a really useful marketing lesson, and something I’ve observed in many sectors since: if humanly possible, you must identify whether what you’re experiencing is a) variety-seeking or b) staple consumption. What do I mean? Well, think about your regular Friday- or Saturday-night take-away. I’d bet that you mainly order the same stuff. Right? In my case I’ve eaten enough spare ribs to encircle Shanghai, and sufficient chicken fried rice to bring the traffic to a sticky halt on The Bund. Sure – I occasionally explore the darker recesses of the menu – but soon I scuttle back to the sunlit security of my staples.

If you analyse staples, they tend not to be the fanciest of foods (think Heinz Tomato Soup, or McVitie’s Digestives, or Walkers Crisps) – but, if push came to shove, you could probably cope with them in your lunchbox from now until retirement day. Many children happily thrive on such staple diets.

In the confectionery market, Mars Bar and Kit-Kat have long occupied the staple slots. Sure, you can break into people’s habits for a time (which is what Crème Egg does successfully each January), but not for good – unless you’re doing it with something that has the capacity to be a staple. And that is undoubtedly very difficult to establish in research.

Wearing my promotional marketing hat, I say thank heaven for variety-seeking behaviour. Our job would be almost impossible without it. But for the marketer looking to a more distant horizon, it’s a threat of equal and opposite magnitude. Now I’m sure Cadbury are comprehensively clued-up to this, and indeed I understand Wispa is ‘officially’ only here on holiday. Good stuff.

Something else Cadbury can capitalise upon is what I think of as the ‘Yo-Yo Effect’. By this I mean neither diet, nor the eponymous circular chocolate biscuit (which, spookily, like Wispa was also discontinued in 2003). No, I’m talking about the real yo-yo, the thing on a string usually flung in the direction of your face by a pesky kid. Every few years (I’m not sure how many) there’s a yo-yo craze… basically you just have to wait long enough until there are enough new kids in the marketplace who’ve not tried one. Add to this critical mass the affection of those older folk who’ve forgotten they actually got fed up of their last yo-yo after five minutes, and it’s the perfect recipe for a sales peak. The trick, of course, is to recognise it’s just that – a peak, not a plateau, and one from which you should have pre-planned your route down well in advance.

Think how many so-called ‘NPD failures’ would have been considered adequately successful if they’d been viewed in the correct perspective: relatively short-term forays aimed at stealing some sales while the going is good. Adopting this kind of philosophy comes easily to the promotional marketer, because it underpins our basic approach. One of my clients is a great national baker, and I really admire the way they launch seasonal lines, and often try new products without too much fanfare – just as you would if you had your own little baker’s shop. Sometimes the seasonal lines do well (for the season), and occasionally a new staple gradually emerges. Wispa, I’m sure, can enjoy a second coming – but I think it needs to plan for a second going, too. In the meantime, I’m off to that store-cupboard while stocks last.