Halloween creeps into summer's ease

Marketing manipulation is getting downright scary.

San Francisco - On Aug. 16, two and a half months before Halloween, I
glance into a Pottery Barn Kids store and have a very scary moment.
Why is my perspective bathed in orange, pulsating with visions of
Halloween lights ... on a perfectly gorgeous summer afternoon?

A few stores away, a gift shop's doorway studded with witches
validates the first sighting: Halloween merchandising has squeezed
itself into the dog days of summer. Before kids have had time to dry
off from the pool, and before moms have completed their back-to-school
lists.

OK. So we've reluctantly adapted to the tinkling of jingle bells long
before we take on the Thanksgiving turkey. We've learned to resist
purchasing Valentines cards lest they outlast the relationship. But
dark and eerie Halloween in bright and sultry August? That's marketing
wizardry that requires serious corporate review.

Or maybe the review has already been completed, and what we're about
to witness are the results. Two days later, outside another retail
complex, I see a large Halloween sign.

Is it another random act by a rogue retailer? Or an up and coming
trend? (On closer examination, I realize it's a Spirit Halloween
store. While its doors are yet to be opened, one can get a jump-start
online.)

Google validates my hunch. Last year the National Retail Federation
reported that Americans were expected to spend $4.96 billion on
Halloween, a 50 percent increase over the $3.29 billion of 2005.

That means the average consumer spends nearly $60 on Halloween, with
$22 per costume. Halloween is the biggest decorating holiday in the
country, trumped only by Christmas, which might have something to do
with why Halloween has been catapulted into the summer.

However, when merchandisers start to pull the strings so blatantly
that our first response is to notice the incongruity, haven't they
gone too far? Can resistance be far behind?

One assumes that the aim of advertising is to create needs subtly, in
ways that lead us to assume they come from within. As Paco Underhill,
master advertising manipulator and author of "Why We Buy," reveals,
successful merchandising begins as early as a retailer's architectural
blueprints, creating traffic trajectories that complement consumers'
psychological and physiological inclinations.

Halloween in August? Not exactly a concept capitalizing on natural
inclinations. Sounds more like a candidate for resistance. Sounds,
too, like a good launching pad for questions such as: What am I doing
in this mall on a beautiful summer afternoon instead of walking,
hiking, swimming, or reading? Why am I consuming? Why am I making an
advertising target of myself? Why should I be recalling images of
Ichabod Crane and Sleepy Hollow, and trying to reconcile the disconnect?

What does this tell me about the bulk of the merchandising
environment, through which I wade daily, mostly unaware? About a
culture and an economy that pivots on consumers gravitating toward its
pull? A pull of which we are frequently unaware, having been so
intricately intertwined with its needs since infancy. How are our
needs created, what internal inclinations are preempted by external
ones, by the incessant tugging of manufactured needs? Are there no
longer any clear distinctions?

These are dangerous thoughts, engendered when manipulation becomes
painfully visible. Perhaps for their own long-term health (and to
disillusion the rest of us that life is merely a series of launching
pads between consuming opportunities), corporate decisionmakers might
be advised to retreat to the path of subtlety. Because two and a half
months of a Halloween-clad culture is bound to generate subversive
little gremlins that might one day come to haunt the boardrooms that
bred them.

~ Written by By Anna Shaff (August 28, 2007)

~ Posted by HalloweenMovie