In 2015, Australian television audiences saw what would be the last of Dolmio’s famously expressive puppet family for more than a decade.
The Muppet-style Italian characters, which had spent years causing kitchen chaos on Australian screens, were quietly put away and removed from above-the-line marketing as the Mars-owned brand pursued a more realistic depiction of family life and mealtimes.
Now, 11 years later, Dolmio is joining a wider revival of brand mascots, as marketers reassess the “cringe” factor that pushed many characters out of advertising and look to repurpose recognisable assets for a social-first media market.
“They are some of the most recognisable, distinctive and enduring assets we have as a brand,” says Shae Tsekouras, portfolio marketing manager at Mars.
Speaking to Mumbrella, Tsekouras said the puppets had never completely disappeared from the brand; despite being taken off screen, they still maintained a spectral presence on Dolmio’s website.
“They have been a part of our story ongoing, just not at the forefront,” she says. “They were taken off screen to prioritise other key messages during that time.”
Those messages took Dolmio in a markedly different creative direction.
In Australia, that included the 2015 Pepper Hacker campaign, which used the Dolmio pepper grinder to shut down the technology competing for attention at the family dinner table.
Meanwhile, in the UK, the brand moved further towards a more austere realism, with British actor Dominic West starring in its 2017 “No Drama” campaign.
As marketing academic Jenni Romaniuk recently told Mumbrella, the issue was not necessarily that mascots were ineffective: they had just become uncool.
“I think it was just a bit of cringe value, like jingles,” she said. “We’ve known for ages that jingles are effective; they stick in our brains. But it was just a little bit of a cringe factor – it wasn’t really cool anymore, and I think mascots were the same.”
But with Dolmio approaching its 40th anniversary, Mars began reconsidering what it had been sitting on.
The opportunity, Tsekouras says, was to use the characters’ recognisability to reconnect with existing consumers while introducing the Dolmio family to a new generation.
“Locally… utilising such distinctive assets to reconnect with existing users with the brand and a deeper emotional level. But also engaging [a] new generation with a brand, it’s obviously really critical moving forward,” Tsekouras said.
She stresses that rather than a one-off anniversary gimmick, the puppet revival will play a longer-term role over the next three-to-five years in Dolmio’s advertising.
“It’s not just one dip and done,” she adds.
Read the full article in Mumbrella.