Candy corn’s marketing strategy, explained

Last year, candy brands like Reese’s and Sour Patch Kids were focused on meeting trick or treaters where they were…aka at home.

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 billion impressions online, which was beyond the brand’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.

This year’s Halloween-candy marketing efforts will likely be a little less stunt-like, mostly because it’s unclear what could be weirder than…all that.

Other than adding two new flavors to the turkey-dinner pack, Brach’s 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. The main highlights this year? An IRL activation and further investments in e-commerce.

Ghost of Halloweens past

Last year, Brach’s—which also makes other holiday-themed candies, like conversation hearts, jelly beans, and candy canes—observed that “shift to e-commerce” every retail marketer couldn’t stop talking about.

But rather than jump on the direct to consumer (DTC) train, Duffy told us Brach’s simply continued its partnerships with e-commerce engines like Kroger, GoPuff, Walmart, and Amazon to satisfy the consumers who bought groceries online—rather than in store—during that first pandemic autumn. According to Duffy, it didn’t start working with e-commerce platforms until 2019.

This year, Duffy said, Brach’s is continuing to make investments with its e-commerce partners (though, she declined to provide exact figures). The company expects shopping behavior to “still be fairly different” than it was in 2019 for the candy corn season. “A lot of people have just changed their habits and have shifted…to e-commerce shipped at home,” she explained.

Despite observing online shopping’s stickiness, Brach’s still isn’t creating its own DTC channel any time soon, Duffy shared. But Emily Moquin, food and beverage analyst at Morning Consult, told us that’s par for the course in the seasonal-grocery category.

“Direct to consumer can be quite an investment for brands in terms of the back end and all the logistics that have to come into place to make it truly work and also be profitable,” Moquin told us, adding that there are even more barriers to a successful DTC arm with seasonal products like candy corn. “It won’t be sustainable for the business to run that direct consumer offering year-round if their sales spike in one time of year.”

Moquin added that grocery as a whole has “lagged other retail categories” in the shift to e-commerce, and that Brach’s is probably able to capitalize on the online shopping boom more strategically with e-commerce partners alone.

Seeing double

Other than the continued shift to e-commerce, Brach’s is also diving back into IRL events this year, as nothing in person happened for the 2020 Halloween season.

Its parent company Ferrara, which also owns brands like Nerds and Trolli, partnered with experiential retailer/toy store CAMP for an activation that’s taking place virtually and at its stores.

Duffy said people can visit Halloween.Camp.com for “virtual trick-or-treating activities” or visit Camp’s brick-and-mortar stores in locations like New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles for “in-person Halloween activities, including candy-corn giveaways.”

Ferrara has also sponsored Chicago’s “Boo at the Zoo” event since 2016.

Other than the return to physical events, Duffy doesn’t see a huge difference between the marketing strategies of 2020 and 2021 for its seasonal candy-corn products. “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,” she explained. Duffy emphasized that for seasonal products like candy corn, it’s best to focus on tradition.

More treat than trick

As it turns out, that’s a luxury—at least according to Moquin. The corn alone brings in roughly half of Ferrera’s Halloween-related revenue, according to the company. Last year, its 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 it more than once per #spookyszn.

“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,” Moquin explained.

Duffy told us that social media is one of Brach’s primary channels for promoting its candy-corn product around Halloween. She said “vast majority” of Brach’s social efforts here are organic, and that Instagram is a primary marketing platform. But upon a visit to Brach’s Instagram account, you’ll only find two grid posts since August 2021…though both are indeed about candy corn.

Moquin explained that because consumers are already looking for candy corn as it’s a “traditional food they associate with the holiday,” there’s not a ton of need for Brach’s to innovate beyond what their strategy has been for the past few years as long as they keep things consistent. “Not all brands are able to do that, but some have that luxury,” she said.

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.”