Halloween is imminent, but the sales potential of this event is still to be realised. Retailers need to jump on this US bandwagon.

It’s Halloween next week, the night when witches fly abroad and those who should know better apply a lot of cheap face paint, drink ghoulish beverages and (maybe) ingest something made from pumpkin or squash.

Although All Hallows’ Eve has been around for centuries, in its current form it is a case of The Empire Striking Back, as much of what we now regard as commonplace is a direct import from the US.

We still have some way to go however if we are to match the enthusiasm with which US retailers embrace this particular occasion. A wander around downtown Santa Monica and sundry parts of Los Angeles yesterday revealed a simple fact: If you want to keep shoppers happy, put pumpkins of whatever size in your stores.

Put them in the flowerbeds of the open-air malls or even install a pumpkin-themed field marketing kiosk in your store (Trader Joe’s has done this in its several central LA branches and probably everywhere else for that matter).

In the UK, for the most part, the majority of retailers, Asda notwithstanding, are content to put some pumpkins on a wood-clad mid-shop display and then stand back.

Halloween continues to grow

This was fine when it was first done, but shoppers have, to a large degree, if a survey from Mintel is to be taken at face value, now made Halloween their own as much as an event for children.

It is also a festival, if that is the appropriate term, which continues to grow, as far as money in the till is concerned.

So what could be done that would make this a rather more interesting event and which might inspire shoppers to dig a little deeper at a time when they are frequently reluctant to do so? Perhaps a little more conviction is required. Displays in the US feature many different types of pumpkins. They are usually accompanied by cobwebs and the orange colour theme is picked up and used across a whole store, rather than confined to a small area, as tends to be the case in the UK.

There is also the matter of product presentation. At the checkouts of a Target store in Hollywood, there were multiple Halloween products, including a breakfast cereal called Count Chocula. Whatever your view on Halloween, this is a bandwagon on which it is still not too late to leap. There is money to be made and traction to be gained by those who begin thinking about how they will deal with this in 2015.

Forget about 2104 however. That one’s already dead and buried.