Goodbye, Upside Down: Marketers are mourning the end of ‘Stranger Things’

As Stranger Things fans theorize about what will happen to their favorite characters and prepare to memorialize the long-running show, brand marketers are saying goodbye to a nearly decade-long marketing opportunity that has few rivals.

Since Netflix’s nostalgic sci-fi mystery series premiered in 2016, the miniseries-turned-juggernaut has become an increasingly powerful vehicle for brand spotlights and partnerships. From early onscreen mentions of Eggo waffles and KFC to broader, real-world activations with brands like Coca-Cola, Doritos, and Tide, the Stranger Things universe’s brand partnerships have been defined by a type of careful brand inclusion and nostalgia that could be hard to replicate.

With most of the second half of Stranger Things’s fifth and final season dropping Christmas Day, and the final episode hitting the streamer (and theaters) on New Year’s Eve, some marketers are mourning the end of a particularly powerful streaming partnership.

“It is bittersweet to see the main story come to a close,” James Wade, senior director of marketing at Doritos, told Marketing Brew. “If they had a Season 6, we could come up with a great concept for Season 6. Not having that there, there is that sense of what could have been.”

Lights, camera, brand action

It all started in Season 1, Episode 2, when main character Eleven, played by Millie Bobby Brown, has her world turned upside down—not by the Demogorgons or evil scientists, but by Eggo waffles.

In the show, the frozen breakfast treat is Eleven’s first introduction to real-kid food after she escapes from the lab she’s been held in her whole life, and she quickly forms a passionate connection to it. Eggos appears again in several comedic and character-building scenes later in the show, cementing the brand’s place in the Stranger Things world.

While the average viewer might assume that Eggo paid big money for that kind of inclusion on a hit show, that wasn’t the case: Netflix previously told Marketing Brew in 2022 that the show had no paid integrations, and that all brand moments were left in the hands of the series’s creators. But that doesn’t mean Eggo’s presence in Stranger Things didn’t lead to results: the brand reported its most-ever social mentions in a single month in October 2017, and sales saw a 14% YoY increase with the premiere of Season 2, and it continues to be important show lore to this day.

That discretionary and creative-led brand integration strategy has continued, leaving marketers like Wade with an appreciation for the authenticity of the brand world within the show. In the final season, Doritos can be seen onscreen munched on by breakout character Derek Turnbow as the Hawkins gang formulates a plan to fight Vecna’s latest plot—an inclusion that Wade said was pitched by the showrunners.

“In some ways, this was a little less involved in the integration on the show and on the set as maybe we are with other types of partnerships,” Wade said. “It was much more [that] the creative had a vision. We made sense authentically in this scene. And the last thing I want to do is disrupt that vision.”

Instead, he said, his focus was on building out Doritos’s own marketing to “create a bigger moment” beyond the inclusion in the series.

Take me back

Offscreen, the Stranger Things title is no stranger to co-marketing collaborations. The final season debuted with retail product drops across categories including apparel, toys, home goods, and food and beverage. Several of these partners, like Dr. Squatch and Doritos, took the opportunity to not only make Hawkins-appropriate regalia, but build ’80s-themed campaigns that took the show’s world into the real world.

The show’s distinct ’80s setting grounds it in reality and nostalgia, something that was attractive to many marketers, including the team at Dr. Squatch, which created a limited-edition line of soaps and a conspiracy-laced campaign starring the series’s own Brett Gelman as his character, Murray Bauman.

Irv Slobodskaya, director of brand marketing at Dr. Squatch, told us that the Stranger Things era and its conspiratorial themes were powerful elements for the brand’s own message to consumers.

“Post-World War II is really where you start to see deprecation of the quality of products that we're using day in and day out from a consumer product standpoint, so the ’80s, there’s still a touch of the classics, but also, that's kind of where people start smartening up to the degradation,” Slobodskaya said. “Really, who better to tell this story of the conspiracy of Big Soap and what’s going awry in the shower than Murray Baumann?”

In the apparel world, brands like PacSun, which has collaborated with Stranger Things since 2022, credit the ’80s aesthetic for design inspiration and connection to its customer base.

“Gen Z, our core consumer, grew up with the show, so the partnership felt natural from the start,” Richard Cox, Pacsun’s chief merchandising officer, said in an email. Beyond that, he noted, the brand was founded in 1980, “which makes our roots especially compatible with the series’s ’80s setting.”

And in food and bev, Doritos rounded out its onscreen appearance with an ’80s-inspired telethon ad spot and a new Stranger Pizza/Cool Ranch flavor in its own ’80s-era packaging that Wade said benefitted from the “playground” of both the show and the time period’s lore.

But while the ’80s might be eternal, Stranger Things isn’t, and brand marketers are now faced with the challenge of searching for the next cultural hit to align themselves with. Wade said the Hawkins journey has hammered home the importance of natural brand fit, a lesson that he said he’ll carry forward into future IP partnerships.

“For us, doing a partnership where what the brand stands for is similar [to] what makes this IP stand out—that connection to nostalgia, but also kind of a fresh, unique take on an era—[is what] resonates,” Wade said. “Gen Z more than any generation, but all of us, really, will scrutinize more and more brands that are doing things that don’t feel authentic.”