Halloween is a hoot — let’s just get that out of the way. But for a seemingly-superficial holiday (dress up and get candy/get drunk), there’s quite a bit going on behind the scenes culturally. And for those of us in the branding world, that’s even more intriguing than the sweets (though less delicious).

This Halloween, we’ve noted the increasing trend for Trick-or-Treaters and Halloween partygoers to forego the traditional fun and/or scary character costumes, and don brand-specific consumer product attire for their once-a-year holiday getups. More and more Xbox consoles, Hershey Bars, Facebook pages, iPhones, and Schlitz beer bottles are sprouting arms and legs each year.

Picking a costume is a fun and personal decision, and with no lack of choices, what does it say about our society when someone shimmies into a specific representation of a branded product? What’s behind this shift away from mummy and princesses towards McDonald’s fries and walking iPads?

Here are a few reasons we think are worth highlighting:

Consumer Products Are A Shared Cultural Currency
As entertainment markets have fragmented into dozens of sub-genres, film and TV references are naturally more obscure than they used to be. So, if a Halloween party-goer is looking for recognition, attending a party in a DIY Aquafresh tube outfit will probably be received better than a meticulously-created-yet-little-known Star Trek character costume.

Better and More Thoughtful Branding
Over the past decade, consumer products have been branded in more distinctive and clever ways, and we’ve wholeheartedly accepted these items into our daily lives with gusto, building ever more robust emotional (and subconscious) attachments to such products as electronics, cleaning supplies, sports clothing, food and beverages, and countless others.

People Are Seeking Comfort and Familiarity
Culturally speaking, it’s often been suggested that uncertain economic times draw the public away from film dramas, and towards escapist comedies and fantasies. With the global markets still tenuous, to an anxious public, horror costumes like witches and Wolf Men may seem less desirable than a walking Coca-Cola can.

Halloween Now Aims At Adults
Marketers have succeeded in pushing Halloween as an adult holiday, and the results have been predictable. After all, it’s adults who buy all the candy and decorations, and it’s adults who purchase the costumes, and it’s adults who use most consumer products. The more grown-ups involved in Halloween, the more their fingerprints will appear on its various aspects.

So that’s the landscape, but how does a brand get in on this action?

Producing a licensed costume seems like an obvious choice. Though branded Halloween digs are becoming increasingly common, an organization rushing to market with a branded getup may be missing the point. It’s not the availability of a costume that’s going to entice people to wear it — it’s their feelings towards the brand in the first place. The stronger and more personal connection we foster towards individual products, the more likely we are to see those products as extensions of ourselves. And with a strong enough bond, we’ll create the costume ourselves, as the thousands of homemade iPod costumes from a few years ago demonstrate.

Branded Halloween costumes aren’t a tool in which to build your brand, they’re an end result of strong brand fundamentals in the first place. The connections people make with their brands and those products happen in the dark recesses of the brain, but they’re not random — they’re based on a few, essential practices that any great brand manager holds in the back of her mind:

Make a Great Product
Whatever opinions you hold about Apple as an organization, the design of their products is second-to-none. Consumers often pay a premium for the design, but the resulting bond that ensues is a powerful force that even today many other manufacturers have failed to realize. It’s not just the devices, though — Apple customer service routinely ranks high in surveys, which further imprints the company’s value and and friendliness amongst their customers.

Have a Consistent Visual Identity
Facebook page costumes have flourished over the past few years, in a way that we never quite saw with MySpace, even at the height of its popularity. Facebook’s consistent color scheme and standard visual look allow it to be recognizable from a distance, with the quickest of glances (A blue and white page with a sidebar, and bam — you’re a Facebook page). A MySpace costume, on the other hand, would not be nearly as identifiable, as they all looked so different. You want your costume to be recognizable.

Be Strong in Your Brand Message
Twenty years ago, bottled water barely existed. Today, it’s a multi-billion dollar industry and people are dressing their kids up in as Fuji water bottles for Halloween. This is a direct result of two decades of singular messaging: Bottled water is the freshest, cleanest, safest water you can buy. Despite this being demonstrably false, the powerful and consistent message has cemented itself in the public psyche, and the results speak for themselves.

Halloween only comes around once a year (as of this writing, anyway), and there’s no lack of costume choices. Those consumer brands that have made the leap from shelf to costume have accomplished something incredible. But it’s not so much the result of fickle consumer choices, as it is the byproduct of strong and consistent brand platforms, visuals, and messaging. With those in place, there’s no telling what people will be wearing come Halloween.

And that’s half the fun.

It used to be that in the old media landscape, the only way to ascend to the top of the pyramid was to be a creator. Inventor. Writer. Painter. Photographer. You had to create something to add value. But with the tools of creation and production becoming cheaper, simpler and more accessible, we’re flooded with the fruits of easy creation: Etsy stores, 3D printing, GarageBand songs, YouTube films, print-on-demand novels, and an ocean of blogs via online publishing software. Tens of thousands of people are now creators, and they’re churning out all kinds of stuff.

Sure, some of it is exceptional, and a few amazing talents have crawled out of these New Creation communities, but the vast majority of these works will probably never rise above the level of Internet meme or flash in the pan. However, this sea change has had an unusual side effect: this gigantic swell of content has given rise to a new, necessary role: The Content Curator. Because we are inundated with so much content and information at this present moment, we need help sifting through everything our culture has to offer. The biggest challenge of our era seems to be navigating this flood of info and creation to find the valuable bits amidst the constant waves. Why, of course, have technologies like DVR and MP3 downloads inserted themselves so quickly into our daily lives? Their popularity is most likely a side-effect of our crucial need to filter, to curate – whether it’s screening out commercials or avoiding album-filler tracks. Modern life almost requires us to winnow all that we process, in order to make sense of the bombardment of data, and carve out our own niches.

And this brings us to the soon-to-be indispensable service role of the 21st century: the content curator. No longer just the province of museum collections or advanced knowledge topics, the role of curation is quickly becoming nearly as important as the content itself. In order to assist in our cultural navigation, many are now seeking out like-minded others to help sort and process this unending flow. It might be a celebrity Twitter stream, a friend’s book reading list or an industry-specific blog. The job descriptions are potentially as varied as the subject matters. And as this content flow increases, so does the popularity of the curators. Oprah has built a media empire on the strength of her role as a gatekeeper, giving out recommendations to an audience hungry for the O-perspective. There are many others.

But can these curators be successful in the long term, without ever creating anything themselves? What kind of value (perceived or otherwise) do they bring? Will this fire hose of content, ripe for the cultivating, dry up some day? Or will content curation become a distributed role, the task for every woman, man and child? Here are a handful of reasons why content curators will continue to thrive, helping us sort and digest far into the future:

Curators help cultivate a shared sensibility.
Connections are made person-to-person, and these bonds come on the heels of some shared interests or insights. Whether it’s a writer whose recommendations you value because you love her writing, or a friend with parallel movie taste, we are all looking for this sort of personal overlap. A sense of common bond, of understanding (real or imagined) drives us to connect ourselves to the thoughts and ideas of others. There’s community in like-mindedness, and when you find someone whose playlists overlap yours, or whose reading list is similar, a bond is formed. These bonds might seem weak, but in an increasingly-fragmented culture, these are important ways we connect and build community.

Curation helps us tell our own exclusion narratives.
It’s much easier to define ourselves by what we are not. “I’m not into that” or “That’s not my type of crowd”. Once we’ve found those we consider to be in our tribe (whether it’s Mad Men viewers or classic gaming aficionados), it’s much easier to appreciate, enjoy and respect their thoughts, patterns and beliefs. They’ve been pre-selected in our head for deeper consideration, which helps us tell our own stories to the world. We see ourselves in the choices of other people, which in turn, colors our perception of the universe around us.

Quantity.
As mentioned above, there is a vast sea of things to choose from – video games, artwork, bands to listen to, articles to read. Our collective rate of creation is far outstripping our ability to consume, so the people and tools that help filter and curate only the things we deem worthy will continue to be popular, important, influential. Simply, our brains either need to be rewired to better filter all that we take in, or we need tools to do the work for us. The tide of info shows no signs of slowing.

Only “the best” will do.
Whether it’s true or not, this is for those of us who Barry Schwartz calls “maximizers”. Many of us want to have the absolute best, the most specific, or the “perfect for me”, whether it’s in Google News, RSS feeds, specific blog selections, Amazon recommendations, or otherwise. There is an underlying unwillingness, in a sea of plenty, to settle for less than the optimum. In a world where we have more and more choices, the desire for the best becomes greater, and the cost for settling grows higher.

We gain at least as much inspiration and encouragement from the work of our students as they receive from our instruction, so we’d like to pass it along by showcasing some of their impressive student projects. Periodically, we’ll highlight great work coming out of our classrooms on this blog.

Last quarter in Tim’s Brand Standards Manuals class at Chicago Portfolio School, Allison Chod chose to redesign the identity for the Tic Tac brand. In addition to building an identity system around her new mark, she also created packaging concepts and a brand book to guide usage of the new rollout.

Allison’s work was selected as one of four winners in the Best Of Quarter competition. Congratulations, Allison.