Social media has ushered in a new era for one of advertising’s oldest tools: the brand mascot. Characters that once operated only within advertising now live continuously across Tiktok, Instagram and other social platforms. As Zac Nikolovski reports, it means you need to be ready to see a whole lot more.
With a new crop of brand mascots appearing in the US — for Crocs, Apple, and Intermarche among others — and with the Dolmio puppets returning in Australia, you may be tempted to conclude adland’s uncoolest tool is back.
But Steve Coll – formerly M&C Saatchi’s team leader behind the Australian Retirement Trust’s big blue monster Artie and earlier in his career worked on Louis the Fly for Euro RSCG – is not convinced.
“I’m not sure if I can comment on them coming back, because I’m not sure that mascots have ever really gone away,” Coll told Mumbrella.
“I think they’ve always been received as a great way to get brand recognition.”
What has changed, he argues, is the arena. Social media has given mascots somewhere to exist beyond individual campaigns, allowing characters to develop personalities, respond to audiences and produce a near-continuous stream of content in a way that television and packaging never could.
“I think what brands have shown recently is that the social media platforms really reward brands that lean into making their characters relevant for today’s audiences on those platforms.”
The basic job of the mascot remains much the same. At M&C Saatchi, Coll’s team created Artie to make the decidedly unsexy world of superannuation memorable.
“There’s not a lot that’s memorable around that,” Coll said. “It’s a difficult category to make things memorable in. I think that’s where Artie played an incredibly important role.”
Australians could be “sitting on a monster” without realising it.
“He was very cleverly, strategically and creatively linked with both memorability, but also what we wanted the audience to ask themselves,” Coll said.
Hardwired for attention
For Ehrenberg-Bass Institute research professor Jenni Romaniuk, whether considered fashionable or not, mascots have long possessed qualities that make them unusually powerful brand assets.
Part of the problem, she argues, is that effectiveness and creative coolness have not always been the same thing, leading mascots to feel outdated.
“I think it was just a bit of cringe value, like jingles,” she told Mumbrella. “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.”
Cool or not, Romaniuk said mascots possess one deceptively simple advantage: they have faces.
“They typically have a face, they speak, they have a personality… they draw attention just like any other face does because we are hardwired sociologically that whenever we come into a room or see a scene, if there’s faces there, we will immediately look at them,” she said.
There is another advantage that has little to do with affection and considerably more to do with control. Celebrities and ambassadors age, change and occasionally behave in ways their sponsors would rather they didn’t. A mascot belongs entirely to the brand.
“Mascots, they’re yours. You own them, you can control them, you get to decide how they look, how they sound. It’s the ultimate Svengali project essentially for a brand.”
That control also gives mascots longevity. While a human face may no longer fit a brand a decade or two down the track, a character can be refreshed, revoiced and reinvented, all while retaining the memories consumers have attached to it.
“The benefit is that, even though it might not have appeared for a long time, there is an audience that will remember it. It’s much easier to refresh latent memory structures than it is to build new ones. But of course, only certain cohorts of people have that,” she said.
“If you’ve got a mascot only millennials will know and Gen Alpha won’t, that’s okay because it’s the millennials that are buying the breakfast cereal for their kids and part of their buying is remembering what they enjoyed as a child.”
Read the full article in Mumbrella.