Harnessing Halloween for New Product Launches

Allergy-friendly consumers get a treat this Halloween, but did marketing efforts do the trick?

Halloween is one of the most decadent holidays – unless you or your child has food allergies and must beware of candy containing common allergens like nuts, dairy and soy. It takes the “treat” out of “trick or treating” and makes in-store Halloween candy-marketing displays simply depressing.

Enter Enjoy Life Foods, makers of foods free from wheat/gluten, dairy, peanuts, tree nuts, egg, soy, fish and shellfish. This Halloween the brand launched its newest #snackfreely product, Dark Chocolate Morsels Snack Packs. Perfect timing for Halloween baking season. But did the brand leverage that?

I found out about the allergen-free snack on Twitter, when Enjoy Life Foods tweeted a buy-one-get-one coupon. Then, I saw a Re-Tweet from a mommy blogger who used the product in festive muffin bites. Why isn’t the brand owning that timely messaging instead of simply repurposing someone else’s content?

Over on the brand’s Facebook page, the morsels are spotlighted in the cover photo. A video shows someone pouring the morsels onto a cup of plain vanilla ice cream. And a few other posts focus on the snack packs. Enjoy Life Foods has social media announcements covered, but there’s so much more the brand can be doing to harness Halloween to increase brand recognition and sales.

Here are a few ideas for Enjoy Life Foods:

Create a signature Halloween recipe featuring the Dark Chocolate Morsels: Instead of just RT-ing recipe posts from mommy bloggers, the brand has an opportunity to release propriety recipes in social media sharable formats. Consider recipe photo cards, how-to YouTube videos, and Pinterest party displays featuring the morsels as a key ingredient.

Release a blind taste test video: How fun would it be for costume-clad kids to sample the chocolate morsels – and have their honest reactions on film? And give them the morsels just to see what they do with them. Maybe they’ll eat them immediately, maybe they’ll shape them into a picture…with kids, you never know.

Leverage the Teal Pumpkin Project: The Teal Pumpkin Project designates allergy friendly trick-or-treating homes. There’s opportunity for sponsorship or cross-promotion, along with general awareness-building with which the brand can be prominently associated.

As someone who is basically allergic to everything, I’m excited to try these new snacks and even more excited to use them in my winter holiday cookies. Speaking of the upcoming holidays, there are many ways for Enjoy Life Foods to continue their campaign through the winter, but we’ll save those marketing and public relations suggestions for another post!

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