Why Home Depot’s Halloween marketing is working without paid media

It’s only early September, but Missy Petrucci already has her coffins lined up and her skeletons in a row. The 54-year-old Newton, New Jersey resident has been decorating her yard ahead of Halloween for some three decades and spends around $1,000 annually. In recent years, her purchases have moved beyond dollar stores and Spirit Halloween outposts to include the likes of Home Depot and Costco, which have amped up their scare tactics with a plethora of animatronics and large-scale Halloween must-haves. “For a fan to finally have these amazing things that they never had before—the 12-foot Skelly at Home Depot, it was super expensive, but then once you buy it and realize how cool it is, it’s like, ‘What are they coming out with next,’” said Petrucci. It’s not just the pumpkin spice that is creeping up in the calendar. So-called Spooky Season starts mid-summer, and many retailers including Home Depot and Lowe’s now begin marketing their Halloween wares with media previews and merchandise preorders in July. Oct. 31 wasn’t a big business for Atlanta-based Home Depot a decade ago, when the chain first began selling Halloween décor. The retailer's release of a 12-foot yard skeleton during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when locked-down consumers were clamoring for entertainment, turned the marketer into a one-stop spook shop Halloween destination. “As COVID hit, everybody was sitting at home, bored, searching the Internet looking for fun stuff and then we came out with this giant 12-foot skeleton,” said Lance Allen, senior merchant of decorative holiday at Home Depot. “It went viral so quick, the TikTok videos really brought it to life.” Sold out skulls The $300 skeleton quickly sold out and, in the years since, Home Depot has added more and more large-scale items to its Halloween offerings. This year, the retailer is planning to have a larger footprint of merchandise in stores than usual as it showcases new stock such as a 13-foot Jack Skellington created in partnership with Disney. The character from “The Nightmare Before Christmas” is retailing for $399 and consumers are limited to one per order. Petrucci bought hers earlier this month. A $248 4-foot animatronic Grim Reaper drum player at rival Lowe’s has already sold out, though a 9-foot zombie is still available. @lowes Rock on 🤘 and find this at Lowe's. ♬ original sound - Lowe’s Home Depot has also sold out of some items online, and most inventory may be gone by mid-September, according to Allen, who has worked on Halloween at the retailer for five years. Ad Age Media Summit Hear from industry leaders during October event in NYC Register here No paid marketing Despite their popularity, Home Depot puts no paid marketing behind its Halloween offerings. “We completely rethought our marketing strategy around it,” said Allen. “We had no marketing budget when this started so we had to get creative around it.” Rather than paying for media, the chain relies on organic social posts and word-of-mouth from excited customers such as Petrucci and her ilk. Home Depot’s social team works with Trade School on some of the Halloween creative on TikTok, Twitter and Instagram that taps into existing trends. For example, at the height of Barbiemania ahead of the “Barbie” movie’s July release, the retailer posted a TikTok showing “Skelly,” the 12-foot animatronic, in his own Barbie-esque toy box with text, “Come on Skelly, let’s go party.” The post earned nearly 500 comments and more than 46,000 likes. @homedepot Come on Skelly, let’s go party ✨💖 ♬ G.A.B - Official Sound Studio This year, Home Depot began marketing Halloween with a Twitter post at the end of June promoting its July 13 merchandise drop. (There was plenty of seasonal orange in the post, which happens to match the retailer’s year-round branding.) You can’t hide from this year’s Halloween lineup. Mark your calendars for July 13 💀🎃👻 pic.twitter.com/1GwYNE8jpp— The Home Depot (@HomeDepot) June 29, 2023 While it’s unclear how much Halloween décor contributes to the bottom line—most home improvement retailers, including Home Depot, do not break out Halloween sales as a specific category—the season provides an opportunity for consumer engagement at a time when overall retail sales are lackluster. Home Depot, citing consumer caution on large-ticket items, reported a 2% decline in second-quarter revenue, to $42.9 billion, last month. Lowe’s saw sales slide 9% in its second quarter, to $25 billion. Home Depot CEO Ted Decker, speaking last month, called out Halloween specifically for fostering customer connections. “Something like Halloween, I mean, it’s not an enormous business for us,” Decker said during the company’s quarterly investor call. “But to say unbelievable engagement, Billy, in that product category, which is 100% discretionary, is a pretty decent telltale of engagement in the sector,” he added, following up on earlier commentary about Home Depot’s Halloween product rollout from Executive VP of Merchandising Billy Bastek. That might give the skeletons a reason to dance. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs

Why Home Depot’s Halloween marketing is working without paid media

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