Halloween gives brands permission to go places that would get them the stink-eye any other time of year.

Most days, suggesting that customers arrange to have their ashes buried in your snack packaging would be a super fast route to a crisis meeting.

But in October? Apparently, that’s brand engagement.

Pringles has launched Once You Drop, inviting fans to sign a “will and taste-ament” for a chance to win a custom metal cremation urn shaped like its famous can, complete with cobweb details and a dead Mr. P logo with Xs for eyes. 😵

The winner also gets $28,080, calculated as one can of Pringles a week for 200 years. 

The best part is how the morbid inspiration is weird but completely true.

Fredric Baur, the chemist who developed the cylindrical Pringles package, was so proud of it that he asked for his own ashes to be buried in one.

His family honoured the request after his death in 2008. Baur had filed for the packaging patent back in 1966. 

Pringles wisely lets a real funeral director, Dan “The Funeral Man” Madden, deliver the campaign with appropriately straight-faced enthusiasm. 

What I like is how completely the idea depends on context.

Halloween temporarily moves the boundary of acceptable weirdness.

Folks put skulls on dining tables, fake corpses on lawns and have severed hands sticking out of car trunks.

Pringles can therefore take an authentic piece of brand history that would be grotesque in April and turn it into something funny, memorable and even weirdly affectionate.

Seasonality can do way more than decorate packaging.

Used well, it can temporarily change the rules your brand is allowed to play by.

True story.

If you’d like help creating and marketing products people feel compelled to buy, the product marketing consultants at Graphos Product can help.