Four Halloween ideas for brands with a character

October is spooky season. Everyone is dressing up, everyone is thinking about costumes, and people are in the mood to play along. If your brand has a character, this is the easiest month of the year to get natural word-of-mouth engagement, because a character can wear a costume and a logo can’t. Here are four specific things to do with that, with examples of who has done each one well.

1. Swap costumes with another character brand

If you know another brand with a character and a friendly team, dress up as each other. Your character goes as theirs, theirs goes as yours, you post on the same morning and tag each other. It costs two drawings and one email, and it puts your character in front of an audience that has never seen it, with a warm introduction from a character they already like. This works especially well on socials because both feeds get the same joke at once, and the comments fill up with people who follow one brand discovering the other.

General Mills did it inside its own house with the Monster’s Bash costume mashup, where the Trix Rabbit and the Cinnamon Toast Crunch squares showed up dressed as Count Chocula, Franken Berry and Boo Berry. Snapchat does a paid version every October, and in 2024 the Bitmoji Halloween drop included Mean Girls and Yellowstone costumes through a deal with Paramount, so your avatar could go as somebody else’s character. Pick a brand your customers would recognise but that you do not compete with, and keep the drawings affectionate. The joke is that the characters are friends.

2. Get your users to dress up

The moment you have a character, you have a costume other people want to wear, and that goes both ways: in real life and on screen. Duolingo’s #Owloween guide from 2021 shows how to dress as Duo or Lily with things from around the house, asks people to post it with the hashtag, and reposts the best ones. Four years later a Duo costume went viral on TikTok on its own, because by then dressing as the owl was a thing people did. The digital version is the same idea. Snapchat gives Bitmoji new Halloween outfits every October so people dress their own avatar and send it to friends. At ClassDojo the monsters get a spooky avatar pack, so a kid can turn their monster into a mummy or a little Dracula inside the app. Either way you are borrowing every participant’s audience, and what people choose to wear tells you how they see the character.

3. Sell a costume pack

The Halloween version of your character is the easiest limited drop you will ever run. Small quantity, one costume, on sale for the month, gone on November 1. Google sells a wizard costume pack for its Chrome Dino figurine. Salesforce puts a vampire cape on Codey every autumn. Duolingo sells a Duo mask so people can be the owl at the party. Discord made a glow-in-the-dark zombie Wumpus plush for Halloween 2023 and it became the thing everyone wanted.

The pack does not have to be physical. Pokémon GO has released costumed Pokémon every Halloween since the witch-hat Pikachu in 2017, and players collect them because they are only around for two weeks. If you don’t make merch yet, a seasonal pack is a gentle way to find out whether anyone wants it.

4. Run it as trick-or-treating

Halloween comes with a mechanic built in, and it is a daily one. For the last week or two of October, the character hands out a treat every time someone shows up. A sticker, a badge, a piece of a costume that assembles over the week, or a small reward inside the product. Some days it is a trick instead, a harmless surprise. People come back the next day to see what today’s is, and the whole month of content spreads itself out instead of piling onto one night. It is streak mechanics wearing a costume, and it works because the character is the one giving out the candy, so a daily check-in feels like visiting someone rather than being nagged by a notification.

Discord runs the cleanest version. Gift someone Nitro during its Halloween event and you pick a trick or a treat, and each one is a Wumpus avatar frame that vanishes after the season. Pokémon GO has done it with double candy every Halloween for years, which is about as literal as trick-or-treating gets, and Fortnitemares does it with limited-time quests that unlock a free Halloween skin if you keep showing up. None of those needs a big budget to copy.

And then there is the fun stuff

Not everything has to be a mechanic. Some of the best Halloween work is a character just having a good time, and it gives the design team a lot to play with. Waze’s Drive with Zombies is my favourite. For a few weeks you could pick a zombie mood, a zombie car and zombie voice directions, so the whole app became the joke. It is an activation play to get people opening the app, but it is also just fun, and they followed it with a Ghostbusters mode the next year. Google has given its Halloween doodle to Momo the cat three times since 2016, and people wait for her. Duolingo sent Duo out as a neon skeleton to haunt Halloween parties in Shanghai in 2024 and remind people to do their lesson. Grafana put its dinosaur Grot in a witch hat. Snapchat ships new Halloween Lenses every year. None of these needed a reason beyond the season.

None of this is a September job. A costume swap needs another brand to say yes, a pack needs to be made and shipped, and a trick-or-treat needs product time, so if you are reading this now, this year is for watching what everyone else does and picking one idea. The work starts in the summer: the swap agreed by July, the pack in production by August, the mechanic built and tested in September, and the whole thing live in the second week of October. I plan Octobers like this for the characters I direct. If you want your character to have a proper one next year, talk to me.