The calendar has not yet turned to November, but the marketing departments of America's beverage companies are already thinking about next October — which is to say, they are thinking about the problem of chocolate.
For nearly a decade now, Fanta has been running what might be called a long campaign to associate its orange soft drink with Halloween, a holiday that has traditionally belonged to the confectioners. The logic is not complicated: if people are going to eat all that candy, they will need something to drink, and The Coca-Cola Company would prefer that something be Fanta.
The effort is explicitly modeled on Coca-Cola's own long-standing connection to Christmas, a relationship that the company has cultivated since the 1930s and that has become so embedded in the culture that many Americans believe, incorrectly but understandably, that Coca-Cola invented the modern image of Santa Claus. (It did not, but it did give him a red suit and a certain wholesome rotundity that proved useful.)
Whether Fanta can achieve a similar hold on Halloween remains an open question. The holiday is crowded with brands, and orange is a color shared by approximately half the products in any given grocery store during October. But the company appears committed to the project, which now involves creators and original characters — the contemporary machinery of brand-building — in service of what one might call seasonal relevance.
It is, in its way, a patient strategy. Most marketing campaigns are measured in weeks; Fanta is measuring this one in years.
Original story published in adweek.com: "Fanta’s Long Game for Halloween Starts With Creators and Original Characters"