Welcome to Innovation Spotlight! Each month we’ll spotlight a brand that’s capitalizing on a current consumer trend with a new product innovation.
This month we researched Fanta’s Haunted Collection, a limited-edition Halloween range built around the brand’s own cast of original monsters — with Ghost Face from the Scream movies as its first guest star.
Read on to get our analysis of the product’s in-market potential, the audiences it appeals to, as well as what you can learn from it to innovate smarter.
Fanta has been showing up at Halloween for more than a decade. But this year the brand went the extra mile and built its own world with its own monsters.
In August, Fanta launched Fanta’s Haunted Universe, its first Halloween entertainment world, with a cinematic trailer and four original characters inspired by classic Halloween legends.
Days later it announced that Ghost Face — the mask made famous by the Scream franchise — would be the first ever guest character to join them, through a partnership with Fun World and Paramount+.
The result is five collectible can designs and one new flavor:
Halloween has become a full retail season, with spending in the US reaching $13.1 billion and nearly half of consumers (49%) starting their shopping in September or earlier.
For years, brands have evoked the spirit of Halloween by licensing someone else’s monsters. This season alone, Michael Myers appears on Voodoo Ranger’s Slasher IPA and Ghost Face turns up on Angry Orchard cider.
Fanta itself put Beetlejuice on cans in 2024 and a cast of Universal and Blumhouse horror icons on cans in 2025. But building original characters means Fanta owns the asset outright and can bring it back every year. It also means starting from zero recognition, which is exactly why Ghost Face is in the lineup to act as a recognizable face.
So what makes a seasonal collection work: the product inside, the packaging outside or the characters on it? Let's find out! Let’s find out!
We use two key measures to determine a product’s success in-market: breakthrough potential and trial potential. Trial potential measures a product’s purchase likelihood, while breakthrough potential measures:
Fanta’s Haunted Collection has a breakthrough potential of 98. This is driven by both distinctiveness (85% vs. 71% norm) and advantage (62% vs. 47% norm) scoring significantly above the norm, which means people see the product as different from other US soft drink innovations and better than them.
People aren’t put off by the price either. Trial potential barely moves once the price is shown — 94 unpriced to 89 priced, a gap of just 5 points. At $8.39 for a 12-pack, people are willing to pay what’s being asked and they see it as fair rather than cheap (only 9% said the price was lower than they expected, vs. 15% norm).
Who finds Fanta’s Haunted Collection most appealing?
Distinctiveness lands with everyone. Every group we looked at sits well above the norm: early adopters (93%), under-45s (88%), men (88%), women (83%). Even over-45s, the group least likely to buy, agree the cans look like nothing else in the aisle (80%).
Advantage is where audiences separate. Early adopters stand apart here — 91% say the collection is better than what’s already available (vs. 47% norm). Under-45s (71%) and men (68%) follow, and women clear the norm too at 57%. Over-45s are the only group that drop to 49% — in line with the norm.
The same split runs through purchase likelihood. Under-45s would buy at $8.39 at a rate well above the norm (70% vs. 52%), while over-45s aren’t as interested (50%).
Similar to most innovations, early adopters are the engine behind this launch. They’re the strongest audience on every single measure: 90% would buy unpriced, 87% would buy at $8.39, and 99% say it meets what they want from a carbonated soft drink (vs. 68% norm).
Men rate the collection higher than women on every measure, but both sit well above the norm — distinctiveness (88% vs. 83%), advantage (68% vs. 57%), relevance (67% vs. 61%) and meets needs (84% vs. 78%).
But when it comes to buying, men’s purchase likelihood actually goes up once they see $8.39 (67% to 69%), while women’s falls substantially from 64% to 56%. The collection appeals to both but the price makes women pause.
Fanta Ghost Face Punch is the winner, with two-thirds saying they’d buy it (67% would buy vs. 19% would not). Strawberry (65%) and Orange (64%) are close behind.
Ghost Face Punch is the only new drink in the collection — Strawberry, Orange, Pineapple and Orange Zero Sugar are all standard Fanta flavors in Halloween packaging. So the new licensed flavor wins by just two points against drinks people are able to buy all year round.
Orange Zero Sugar is the odd one out — 42% say they wouldn’t buy it, compared to 40% who would. Every other can is overall net positive.
This is because Zero Sugar is more suitable to a specific target audience. Here’s what some of the people say:
What people say they’d buy first tells a slightly different story. Ghost Face Punch still leads, picked by 56% as their first purchase, but Orange jumps to second at 51% — ahead of Strawberry, which drops to 40% despite being the second-most appealing can in the range.
Strawberry is well liked but it isn’t what people reach for first, while Orange punches above its appeal because it’s the can they already know. This suggests Ghost Face Punch is the reason to stop and look, while Orange is the familiar flavor people trust.
Generally, Fanta isn’t the go-to for most soda drinkers. Almost everyone we surveyed (92%) had bought a carbonated soft drink in the last two weeks, but only 36% had bought Fanta.
But the Haunted Collection gives them a reason to choose Fanta. Of those who’d consider buying it, 43% say it would replace what they usually buy rather than sit alongside it (vs. 35% norm). That’s a strong sign the collection would win share from other drinks.
If the collection wasn’t available, people’s most common picks would be Sprite, Crush and Dr Pepper, and orange sodas like Crush and Sunkist come up a lot. That fits what we saw with the cans: the collection appeals to orange soda drinkers, which helps explain why plain Fanta Orange converts so well.
And they wouldn’t buy it just once. Nearly two-thirds of those who’d consider it (63%) say they’d pick it up at least every two to three weeks, and 58% say it makes them want to buy soft drinks more often (vs. 46% norm).
Comments about the design and the characters outnumber comments about flavor, which makes sense, because for most of this range the artwork is the only thing that’s new. The design is the innovation here, and the response tells us it landed.
People said things like:
People are excited about completing the set and several plan to keep the cans after drinking them.
They said things like:
Ghost Face is the only character in the collection people already know, and for horror fans that recognition is the whole appeal.
People said things like:
People thought the collection would fit great for gatherings and specifically as an option for everyone who isn’t drinking alcohol.
They said things like:
Few brands commit to a season the way Fanta has committed to Halloween. Right now Ghost Face is doing the heavy lifting, but every Halloween Fanta’s own monsters come back is a Halloween the brand needs a licensed character less. Unlike a licensing deal, the world it’s building is Fanta’s to keep!
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