How do you help consumers connect with your product during a holiday of ghosts, ghouls and ghastly creatures? Humanize the packaging! This Halloween, we noticed a trend of brands featuring facial features on their packages. Here’s a fast and fun look at a half-dozen standouts—including a new design from PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay and bare-bones packs for costumes.

1. We start at the top (literally!) with a human head…

In a creative example of packaging reusability, The Hershey Co. sells two of its favorite chocolate candies—Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups miniatures and Hershey’s miniatures—in an injection molded white skull that doubles as a bowl/decoration. Party hosts can use and reuse the dead-head to hold candy or other giveaway goodies.

Graphics are printed on removable labels, with the main one a full-body (well…just the head!) shrink label, printed with black-and-white spiders and webs with color brand/product identifiers of the candy inside in the eye-sockets. Once labels are removed, the plain “container” loses its brand identity but becomes a useful decoration year after year.

Granted, with such an unusual package shape, the shrink label is a bit wrinkly in spots—but that kind of adds to the tactile appeal. At least it did for me when I picked it up—almost like old skin on bones.

A thermoformed cap is held on the top of the skull with a removable pressure-sensitive label, which provides some product protection (unfortunately, many of the skulls were “opened” on the shelf at the Jewel store where I found this). For added safety, sealed, plain white bags inside the skull holds the two types of wrapped candies.

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2. Day of the Dead Tattoos are packed simply in a clear flat pouch with an easy-open flap on the bottom and a header with a peg hole at the top. Eye-catching color graphics on the front show the proper placement of the temporary tattoos, while the actual sheet of tattoos shows through the transparent back.

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3. Mars goes a familiar route with big-mouth monsters providing a peek into the bag to see what you’re buying. The standard pillow-pack pouch adds gussets on the sides so, with the weight of the candy, the bag flattens on the bottom to stand up nicely for vertical shelf display.

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4. Minimal packaging is all that’s needed to merchandise this Dog Selfie Kit. A peggable paperboard card is printed with an attractive face, with the “costume”—a headband with dog ears and a plastic nose—held on with twist-ties poked through a couple holes. Not much expense for a low-cost item.

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5. An entire end-aisle display of character glasses also uses a simple paperboard card with die-cut slits so the glasses can fold down and hold themselves on the “package.” Some of the glasses are licensed characters, like Marvel’s Captain America, and others are generic animal or other “faces.”

CLICK NEXT BELOW FOR THE FINAL ITEM—SOMETHING NEW FROM FRITO-LAY!

6. This year, Frito-Lay is doing something new with its Halloween Variety Pack, which holds 18 single-serve bags of popular salty snacks: Cheetos, Doritos, Lays and Fritos. Not only are sturdy flexible sacks printed with fun monster faces, but they can be reused as a trick-or-treat bag in a pinch. And this year, parents can also to redeem free reflective stickers to personalize costumes or trick-or-treat bags for greater safety when going door to door.

Additionally, Frito-Lay released limited-edition trick-or-treat bags available online at Amazon and Kroger that “increase a child’s visibility or the likelihood of being seen at night when reflecting a vehicle’s headlights or other source of light against the bag,” according to Frito-Lay. Click here to watch a video.

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