Scary stuff

This blog post was published on October 30, 2012 at 11:13 am GMT

I see in the paper that Waitrose has announced unprecedented demand for Halloween merchandise this year, making the annual end-of-October ghoulfest a close second to St Valentines Day as the biggest seasonal spending event after Christmas and Easter. Meanwhile in America, the National Retail Federation reckons consumers will splash out the equivalent of £5 billion on Halloween parties, fancy dress and food – an increase of about £5 per head  on what they managed in 2011.

I’ve never quite got the point of Halloween myself. But it’s clearly a marketing phenomenon of paranormal proportions. At the turn of the 20th century in the UK we barely spent £12 million on it. This year the figure is expected to reach over £300 million.

One of the reasons for its success is the way in which canny marketers are happy to be flexible about segmentation when it suits them. Segmentation, you’ll recall, is the marketing strategy that looks for  manageable sections (or segments) of a market with distinct needs and treats them on their own terms, rather than using a ‘one size fits all’ strategy. So, for example, your bank probably has a number of different current accounts available for people of different income brackets. Segmentation makes things more complicated for businesses by multiplying the number of products or services they have to offer (unless they choose to specialise in a particular niche). But it also leads to higher profits because we are willing to pay more for things that meet our needs more exactly than the alternatives available.

One of the most obvious, and best established, forms of segmentation is based on age. For example, children tend to want different things from adults when it comes to clothes, breakfast cereals and entertainment, so businesses treat them separately with profitable results in each of those markets. Or at least that used to be the case. Halloween marketing  in the UK  was once restricted to weird sweets and dressing-up clothes for tots. Now the grown-ups are getting in on the act, with full-size costumes jostling the kids’ ones for supermarket space, and seasonal booze promotions alongside the toffee apples and eyeball-style gobstoppers. To some extent this is American tv and film at work, though  the proximity of good old British Guy Fawkes night on 5th November has helped facilitate a party feel. However it is also symptomatic of a blurring of the boundary between adult and child marketing, as Halloween is increasingly pitched at an older audience.

Harry Potter, poster boy of the paranormal, pioneered this trend.  The surprising popularity with adult readers of what was originally launched as childrens fiction led to the simultaneous publication of ‘older’ and ‘younger’ editions of subsequent instalments, with book jackets to match.  And fiction is not the only market where this is happening, leading some commentators to bemoan the infantilisation of adult tastes in areas such as food and apparel which once had clear age appropriate demarcation lines.

I think British adults can be forgiven for wanting to stage a Halloween takeover this year, however. After a celebratory summer of sport and royal jubilee, the sudden shock of dark evenings on Greenwich Mean Time, together with a news diet of continuing economic gloom and depressingly sordid celebrity revelations, means that we could all do with some cheering up.  See you around the pumpkin.