Halloween never sleeps. Why does your brand?

If a house of horrors can sell out in April, brands should be tapping fandom year-round. Here’s how.

People love a good scare. It’s why Hollywood can spool out a horror franchise for decades, Stephen King mints bestsellers and “boo” ranks among first words commonly spoken by babies in the U.S. We’re hard-wired for it. How else to explain the tens of billions spent every year scaring the pants off ourselves?

Halloween, of course, is the Super Bowl of the fright-night industrial complex, but on November 1, don’t be fooled by the baskets of half-price fake blood. Fright culture is evolving into an always-on phenomenon, with lucrative lessons to teach brands with no stake in scare tactics. Elaborate immersive experiences opening in Las Vegas, content studios repurposing vacant malls, and humble, holiday-themed bars are proving that fandom doesn’t always conform to a calendar. This lesson illustrates what many brands suspect but few act on: Their IP can be activated year-round. Doing it effectively, though, takes a keen understanding of how people want to experience it.

? Brands that resist timeboxing their IP recognize that fandom is fluid. It may have its peaks — global interest in curling spikes during the Winter Olympics (shocker) — but when nurtured across all dimensions of human experience, it can pay dividends all year long. Here’s how to go about it.

Make It Multidimensional

In the pantheon of sure things, Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights would rank right behind death and taxes. Running from late September through Halloween, the nights have been throwing off cash for more than three decades — $500 million-plus in recent seasons, according to reports.

Activating studio IP around Halloween builds a sense of immediacy and scarcity that registers at the turnstiles. Even so, Universal Destinations & Experiences executives can’t be faulted for wanting to replicate this autumnal windfall year-round. Enter Universal Horror Unleashed, a spectacle that will cover 110,000 square feet at Area15, a rapidly expanding experiential district in Las Vegas. Critically, Horror Unleashed is a niche concept with features guests won’t encounter at Universal Hollywood or Orlando, which helps reinforce IP at all three locations.

Brands without acreage, or with less recognizable names in their portfolio than Dracula and Chucky, can still authentically extend their IP. Doing so requires a multidimensional experience audit. In fewer syllables, an MDX audit entails looking across the physical, chronological, technological and human dimensions of a brand to find opportunities for growth.

Universal Horror Unleashed covers off on all four dimensions: engaging visitors at a physical location; extending what’s nominally a Halloween experience year-round; incorporating technologies that heighten the attractions’ viscerality; and satisfying that fundamental human love of a good fright. But how might an organization that’s completely removed from the entertainment industry, like a retail bank, go about an MDX audit? It could start by asking how it’s caring for the customer before they set foot in a branch (chronological), or scrutinizing their digital tools for opportunities to make everyday transactions feel more personalized (technological; human).

Why stop there? Spaces like airports, museums, even health clinics hold a staggering amount of MDX potential just waiting to be unlocked.

Rewire the Physical-Digital Connection

Brands are forever pursuing that elusive bond between their brick and mortar and digital. Get it right, the thinking goes, and you’re riding a revenue rocket. However, that fiction elides the fact that brands that show up strong across all dimensions — not just physical and/or digital — earn more revenue, more buzz and more recognition.

Netflix lives this truth every day. Not every fan can jet down to Orlando for a brand experience, so the streaming giant has literally taken its shows on the road for years, staging pop-up fan experiences throughout the U.S. The success of those initiatives has proven the strength of its IP, even when shows were between seasons. Come 2025, the studio will inaugurate permanent Netflix Houses, extending the seasonality of fan favorites like “Squid Game” and “Stranger Things” in spaces vacated by anchor retail tenants at the Galleria Dallas and King of Prussia Mall outside Philadelphia. It’s a move lifted right out of the fright-night playbook.

Granted, activating fandom year-round becomes much easier when the experience comes to the fan. But multidimensionally-minded brands are also crafting pathways to irresistible virtual experiences that convey a similar sense of immersion as a physical build-out, at a fraction of the cost. Scary, but true.

Flip the Familiar

For all the tens of millions invested in big brand IP extensions, sometimes the intimate gesture wins. If you’ve knocked one back at Lala’s Little Nugget in Austin, Texas, you’ll know what I mean. Brimming with Christmas kitsch, the bar has been giving the Gregorian calendar the finger since 1972. Go in July when it’s 105 degrees outside, or on a December night that’s more conducive to a hot toddy. Santa don’t judge. People love the lug year-round, a fact many brands would do well to remember when they’re discussing ways to extend their own IP.

Even seasonal retail like Spirit Halloween Stores, whose locations get positively ransacked in the days leading up to the big day, are missing an opportunity to apply a multidimensional lens to the customer experience. How many people go in without the slightest idea of what they want to leave in? Applying the technological and physical dimensions of MDX, why not explore ways to seed costume ideas in the aisle — or better yet, before entering the store — to stave off aimless, dispirited browsing? Where’s my personalized phantasmagorical shopping experience? Where’s yours? And why wouldn’t Spirit want to explore how to extend their eponymous spirit earlier or later in the year?

Admittedly, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. The road to brand extension is paved with tales of brand dilution. (Witness the exquisite, tinsel-covered corpse of Christmas Tree Shops.) However, understanding niches in your brand fandom can reveal real answers that lead to sound action. It all starts with an MDX audit. No tricks.

Matt Quinn is a Managing Director at Journey, a global design and innovation studio pioneering multidimensional experiences that transform how people perceive, engage and interact with the world.