In case you’ve forgotten how dystopian Halloween 2020 was, let us remind you that Reese’s deployed a robot door to roll around and dispense candy to children, while Sour Patch Kids coined the term “reverse trick or treating,” meaning it brought the Kids to the kids via package deliveries.

• Brach’s also found a gross unique way to grab attention during the unconventional year.
• The brand debuted a turkey-dinner-flavored version of its signature candy corn, garnering over 6 million impressions online, which was beyond the team’s “wildest dreams,” according to Katie Duffy, VP and GM of seasonal at Ferrara, owner of Brach’s.

Fun fact: Duffy also told Marketing Brew that the idea for turkey-dinner flavors came 100% from the marketing team.

But other than adding two new flavors to the turkey-dinner pack and bringing back IRL events, Brach’s—which also makes other holiday-themed candies, like conversation hearts, jelly beans, and candy canes—isn’t making any major changes to its Halloween marketing strategy this year. With 86% of candy-corn market share, per Duffy, the brand often finds itself leaning on tradition and the familiarity of its products.

Seeing double

“I don’t know that we’re necessarily doing anything largely differently. We’re still working with our retail partners to make sure that our products are available on the sales floor when people would normally expect it to be,” Duffy explained. She emphasized that for seasonal products like candy corn, it’s best to focus on tradition.

But, but, but: Brach’s started working with e-commerce platforms in 2019. This year, it’s selling the corn on sites like Amazon and GoPuff. But it hasn’t jumped on the direct-to-consumer train.

• Last year, Brach’s candy corn brought in more than $60 million, while Ferrera’s Halloween non-chocolate candy retail sales as a whole made $120 milion.
• Additionally, Duffy told us that candy-corn consumers have a high repeat rate of purchase throughout the Halloween season, meaning that they’re likely to purchase the candy more than once per #spookyszn.

More treat than trick: “In food and beverage and the holiday season, there’s such strong ties to tradition and nostalgia. And some brands that are able to really lean on that and don’t need to be reminding consumers about how timely and relevant they are around Halloween or Thanksgiving,” Emily Moquin, food and beverage analyst at Morning Consult, explained.

For example, every year there’s some debate on social media about whether candy corn is a disgusting relic of the 1950s, or the best part of trick or treating. Brach’s could easily generate some attention for the brand if it were to chime in on this debate.

But Duffy told us the brand tries to engage more positively with its products, and that the marketing team really doesn’t love “engaging with the haters.”

Read the full story here.—PB

Companies and special-interest groups spend billions each year on lobbying, trying to achieve policy outcomes beneficial to them by courting lawmakers and policymakers. But a team of academic researchers has found that this American pastime, although a financial boon to companies that engage in it, can negatively affect customer satisfaction.

Their study, recently published by the American Marketing Association in the Journal of Marketing, also offers marketing-based solutions to mitigate these effects.

Gautham Vadakkepatt, an author on the study and associate professor of marketing at George Mason University’s School of Business, explained that there have been numerous academic studies about how lobbying positively impacts a company’s finances, but few, if any, have looked at its impact on customers.

“So we know that lobbying has a positive impact on financial performance. Does this have any consequence on consumer outcomes?” Vadakkepatt told Marketing Brew.

• To find out, the research team looked at lobbying data from dozens of publicly traded companies from 2000 to 2014, plus data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which surveys Americans about the quality of the products and services they use.

Results: The researchers found an inverse trend between customer satisfaction and how much companies spent on lobbying. The question then becomes how to explain the trend: Why would lobbying be linked with lower customer satisfaction? Vadakkepatt told us the answer is attention.

“We conjecture that because companies’ attention is being spread across multiple domains, the focus on customers can go down, and therefore hurt customer satisfaction,” he said.

Click here to read about how the researchers measured attention on customer-related issues, as well as about how marketing can play a role in reducing the customer satisfaction loss that comes with lobbying.—ZS

Even if your Halloween weekend plans are more pumpkin patch, less horror-movie screening, you’ll probably relate to these scary stories from marketers. In honor of the holiday, the ghouls and goblins of Madison Avenue told Marketing Brew the spookiest things that happened to them this year.

Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The Gen Z: “That one time our VP of marketing’s influencer sister dunked on our TikTok game.” —Allyssa Eclarin, director of product marketing at Postal.io

The stranger: “We were doing an activation for a big show premiere with a celebrity and a movie star, which constituted a Twitch stream on the celebrity’s channel. The celebrity shared his Twitch handle, which was included in all the show’s marketing surrounding the stream, as well as his own personal promotion of the event on social media. The stream launched…and we quickly realized that the celebrity gave us the wrong handle. All of the fans were guided to the wrong person’s channel!” —Irina Shames, SVP of strategy and revenue at 3BlackDot

The Zuck returns: “Facebook and Instagram coming back to life after the outage—top most scary thing of 2021, tbh.” —Chi Thukral, head of content marketing at Yanko Design

The “Man in the Mirror”: “I often notice a lot of imitation in what I create or strategize around, which is all good, until I noticed someone was semi-impersonating me. They used a bunch of personal content (Instagram, Instagram Stories, Twitter) I created (some in collaboration with brands) and even had my photo as their profile picture, but they kept their own name and location, and their links led to a blog of some sort that they were trying to promote as their own. Imitation may be flattery until it isn’t I guess.” —Charles Etoroma, social content manager at Warby Parker

If you think you can top any of these, hit reply to this email and try to give us a fright.—ZS, PB

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Instagram: At last, the links belong to the people. IG just made link stickers in Stories available to everyone on the platform. Here’s what that means.

Direct response: Getting the right response from an ad is tricky, especially when you’re trying to get an instant one. Here’s a guide on how to effectively carry out direct response marketing.

TikTok: When you’re not getting hypnotized by your For You page, you can use the app to grow your brand. The company put together these tips and success stories for small businesses.

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Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• A new nonprofit that calls out shadiness in ad tech
• PayPal is not buying Pinterest, and other news about the social media platform
• Nielsen’s new metric for college sports teams’ marketing potential

There are a lot of questionably named companies in the murky marketing universe. Two of these are real ad tech companies. The rest are celebrity child names. Can you tell them apart? Keep scrolling for the answers.

• Zaius
• Raddix
• Dweezil
• Viant
• Exton

Raddix is the child of Cameron Diaz and Benji Madden. Exton’s parents are Robert Downey Jr. and Susan Downey. Frank Zappa and Adelaide Gail Zappa named one of their kids Dweezil. (Vogue)

But let’s be real: This doesn’t rule out Zaius and Viant from eventually being celebrity baby names.