3 Secret Lessons From The Fast Food Candle Trend
It’s late on a weeknight and you don’t feel like cooking, but you have to eat. Unfortunately, everything you want is closed. Everything, that is, except for fast food.
Maybe just this once. It won’t kill me, right?
And so you reluctantly drive yourself to the nearest golden arches to delve into the latest dollar menu offering.
Almost everyone has an experience like this – last-minute or late-night fast food runs. Sometimes for pleasure, and sometimes to meet a basic human need for food. Not necessarily nutrition, but food. Fast food.
As candle makers, understanding how fragrance triggers the amygdala to fuel memory is imperative to building an incredible product line. Scent is powerful, and for better or worse, the fast food industry occasionally takes advantage of it and makes a fast food candle for the world to experience!
A few fast food restaurants launched candles in 2020 based on their menu items. Gimmicky? Of course. But effective? Absolutely.
McDonalds released 6 candles based on ingredients in their Quarter Pounder burger. Dairy Queen released 6 candles too, but based them on new Blizzard flavors in their menu. Panda Express only released a single candle flavored like a Honey Sesame Chicken Breast to announce the return of a menu item of the same name.
Besides Panda Express, the candles sold by McDonalds and Dairy Queen sold out in minutes. Boom. Gone. Over. Maybe a little bit suspicious too, but that’s a story for another day.
The fast food candle trend of 2020 might seem weird and off-center, but underneath the covers of this craze are three lessons for candle makers to pay attention to.
There's More To A Candle Than Wax & Fragrance
The biggest lie many candle makers believe is that building a high quality candle line brings in the most business. Quality is important, yes, but it isn’t going to attract your customers.
Remember, selling products occurs in three phases:
- Finding potential customers
- Selling to customers
- Following up with your customers (are you doing this one?)
The quality of your candle isn’t a factor until they’re actually burning it (after you’ve already sold it).
High quality experiences with your product establish trust and fulfill a promise you’re making to them with your artisan design, that what they’re burning is truly the result of many hours of thought, testing, and production from your humble workshop to their home.
Do you believe each fast food candle was built to perform better than the average Etsy store candle shop? Odds are good they weren’t. In fact, the label design on each isn’t anything special either:
Possible infringements on United States labeling requirements aside, there’s nothing incredible about the containers or labels. They just kind of… exist.
These candles successfully sold because they told a meaningful story – not because they were beautifully made.
Few customers lined up to buy a fast food candle for a sincere desire to smell greasy food or ice cream in their home. Each candle represented a move by the brand to raise awareness of something they were doing they believed meant something to their people:
- McDonalds celebrated a 50-year anniversary of their Quarter Pounder
- Dairy Queen promoted new Blizzard flavors for the upcoming season
- Panda Express announced the return of the Honey Sesame Chicken Breast menu item with a candle of the same name
If you read about their product, you also read the story. No one released candles for the sake of expanding their overall product line. Each had motivations to promote other parts of their business and likely didn’t make much or anything for their candles.
In fact, Dairy Queen donated 100% of profit from candle sales to Children’s Miracle Network Hospital – they don’t need the cash anyways because they’re banking on enhanced sales of their new Blizzard flavors (and also like to support a good cause… something you can build into your own story).
Every story told by these candles resonates with a particular group of people. McDonalds, DQ, and Panda Express know their audience – it’s what allows them to continue growing every year! Stories drive customers to your work. Quality and promise-keeping encourage them to come back.
Lesson #1: the story, motivation, and mission behind your candles matter more than quality of the final product.
Don't Start With Risk
Perhaps the most obvious takeaway from fast food candle making is risk assessment.
Your very first product line should be hyper-focused on a single type of candle with a limited number of scents. Obviously you’re free to start however you want, but expanding too much too fast spreads your work thin, and your quality will suffer.
Instead, manage risk over time after you have an established income stream from your product line. Many candle makers try to be everything for everyone (candle types, container shapes, colors, fragrances, etc), which is low-key risky. We aren’t all Walmart, and function more effectively as artisans promising fewer products created with more attention.
Every fast food candle comes from a company with an established product line and identity. They aren’t “breaking into” the candle market – they would quickly fail. Instead, they’re going outside a comfort zone to draw attention to themselves for a short while.
Candle making is risky for fast food companies. If making candles and burgers was a lucrative business model, there wouldn’t be news stories about it. Each company is managing risk by balancing the expected additional business from their headline against losses on their candles.
Think about it – development, production, and marketing of candles is completely outside the wheelhouse of a fast food company. Reaching the headlines like they have required a relatively serious capital investment with no guarantees of the results.
McDonalds, Dairy Queen, and Panda Express can bankroll and afford to lose on the candle game without compromising their core business. And while candles are significantly different than fast food, the same concept applies to expanding a product line beyond your zone.
One major difference is the limited time these candles lived under their banner, but we’ll talk about trends below.
Lesson #2: Don’t compromise your core business by creating too much risk in expanding your product line.
Learn To Use Scarcity
A major advantage of these companies is their long tenure in business. They’ve been around for awhile, found their identity in many cultures, and adapted well to new circumstances and ideas.
Building an empire also comes with joining, and occasionally creating, trends.
McDonalds and Dairy Queen sold out in minutes. The lizard brain in some of you may wonder if they ever sold any candles at all, but it doesn’t matter. The point is their announcement made headlines, triggered a dozen blogs, and built awareness of their work.
Limited availability of these off-center products only helps increase their worth, and operates as a lesson in scarcity for the rest of us.
Neither McDonalds nor Dairy Queen offer the candles mentioned by the headlines anymore. A small amount sold over a short period of time and made the news through being two things: unique and scarce.
Scarcity is invaluable towards motivating human beings. People are natural procrastinators, and unlimited quantity of something doesn’t help them make a decision.
In a world where everything is literally at your fingertips on a smartphone, introducing an element of scarcity helps you stand out. For fast food candle making, the limited quantity will boost sales and increase prices if they ever release more because people know they have to act if they want to take part.
Traditional candle makers can leverage the same idea to help people let if fly when the time comes. Even if they want it and are sincerely interested in your candle, if they have no pressure to buy they may never buy. That’s just how human beings are wired – pressure helps drive decision making.
While you may think purposeful scarcity is somewhat manipulative, it really isn’t. Your products and time have a value, and limiting the amount you’re willing to provide to your people broadcasts a message about what you make.
You’re telling them through a limited quantity that your work is high quality because unlimited quantity suggests a lower quality. The message also builds a natural incentive to them to take action against your promise.
Limiting your count also helps excite everyone about what’s coming, such as your seasonal scents or themed product lines. McDonalds and DQ understand that strategy well and used it for their benefit in the press.
Lesson #3: Use scarcity to incentivize your people to take action.
Conclusion
Building a successful and profitable candle business requires more than just great candles. You need to understand people to craft a message about your work, and you need to understand your people to hear their voice and understand their problems.
You’re not selling candles to provide light when the electricity goes out anymore. Instead, you’re providing a specific experience, a decoration, or reinforcing a need for luxury items. Defining your role and message to fit that for the right people and the right time will separate your work from everyone else.
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