Does your mascot match your brands personality

DOES YOUR MASCOT MATCH YOUR BRAND’SPERSONALITY?

The modern age we live in has changed the way we experience information. Partly due to the rise of Internet’s Web 2.0, where simplistic and visual interaction is desired as a standard for user experience and the shift towards fully digital service, a brand’s window for information broadcasting towards consumers is shrinking each day.

A brand’s personality can often be translated through an ‘inner character’ emphasizing its goals and value

On a visual level, the corporate visual identity consists of all visible expressions and symbols of a brand (van Nistelrooij, 2012). According to Wallace (2006), the use of color, symbols and icons should be in congruence with the positioning of the brand to evoke the best possible brand experience. Thus, all visual elements should be in congruence with that of the brand’sarchetype.

Beside the use of logos, brands often implement a visual marketing strategy in which they are made to be actually ‘alive’ (Aaker & Fournier, 1995), by using brand mascots. Familiar examples of this are the Kool-Aid lemonade or the M&M’s both brought to life and loved tobe consumed by their surroundings. In other cases, an additional character is developed to personify the brand such as the fictitious Energizer Bunny running endlessly on its batteries

One reason for this is because mascots embrace the power of recognition (Brown, 2011), which is used to understand and process the experiences happening in our daily lives. Although one mightassume that brand mascots would be a little drawn out by its massive application in today’smarketing, the use of anthropomorphic characters for achieving brand recognition remains popular.

Anthropomorphic marketing had an enormous boost when legendary adman Leo Burnettstarted designing many famous brand mascots under his firm in the early 30’s. The MarlboroMan, Tony the Tiger, the Pillsbury Doughboy and Morris the Cat are only some examples of his successful creations in brand anthropomorphism (Hatch & Obermiller, 2010). From this point, brand mascots started appearing everywhere on products and throughout the media. Children often seem to be the most impressionable (Anistal, Liska, & Anitsal) and are often the main target group of these endorsers. This is best illustrated by looking at the breakfast cereals lane in a random supermarket; only a few products present their packaging without the use of a cheerful mascot character. 

Whether this is due to the automatic assumption by advertising agencies that a related fit is required, and therefore only mascots with visual overlap such as the Michelin Man made out of tires and the Pillsbury Doughboy made of dough are developed, or because only mascots which include this fit are often eligible for success, remains unknown.

Results based on the relevance of the proposed mascots in this study towards a brand in general have shown that attractiveness, open posture, cheerfulness and connectedness to its surroundings are characteristics that have a fit with brand mascots being perceived as adequate. As the other characteristics still contribute to adding character to the mascot from a brand archetype perspective, these characteristics should have a strong emphasis when designing a brand mascot. This is not very surprising, as most existing brand mascots seem happy, open and are nice to look at. Because brands can hold human characteristics (Aaker J. , 1997), they try to create a personality of which we want to be friends with, just like we choose who we become friends with in real life. Here, we are also triggered by attractiveness, openness and happiness.