When customers recognize your product’s taste as your brand, you have something you can carry into new formats and occasions.

For most of my life, Reese’s was peanut butter cups and the Pieces Elliott shared with E.T.

“Two great tastes that taste great together,” as the old ads put it after chocolate collided with peanut butter in the happiest of accidents.

Over time, that combination became a single taste we recognize as Reese’s. (Although the chocolate seems to be eroding into “chocolatey”.)

If you can eat PB, you probably anticipate that flavour before opening the wrapper, even when the product inside is shaped in a totally different way.

And lately, those products are poppin’ up everywhere: grocery aisles, pharmacies and the hardware store’s seasonal junky-treats section.

Here in Canada the lineup includes caramel-filled Big Cups, THiNS and dipped pretzels. At Halloween, the familiar taste turns up dressed as pumpkins, ghosts and bats.

Each reconfiguration offers yet another way to get something customers already know they want.

Now Reese’s is extending that familiarity into the neighbourhood. Its search for America’s “Trick-or-Treatiest Street” has identified 150 contenders.

An expert council including Christina Ricci and Kathy Najimy will announce the winner October 21, with a Reese’s block party in partnership with Zillow as the prize.

The commercial opportunity is substantial: Americans alone are expected to spend US$4.1 billion on Halloween candy this year.

Cleverly, Reese’s wants its familiar taste mashup attached to the pleasure of being the house with the good stuff.

That connects with the question behind I Need That: what makes a product worth wanting? Here, a taste customers recognize gets a role in a ritual they enjoy.

For product teams, the useful question is what customers would recognize with your logo covered-up.

Once you own what they’ve come to love, you can find new occasions and formats for delighting them with it.

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