If you want customers to accept a brand, what do you draw on to tell its story? Mascot is definitely a good choice: a good mascot can catch people’s eyes at the first time, its adorable appearance and behavior shape the brand’s image, and its story is the story of the products. Colonel Sanders from KFC, the clown from McDonald’s, and the Quaker Man from Quaker OatsThus are all successful cases. Do you want to own such great mascots as well and explore how to use mascots in marketing strategies? Just read this article!
Why do you need to use mascots in your marketing?
Mascots are active in many fields, serving their brands to tell brand stories to people and attract them to buy products. To go into more detail, what functions do mascots have in brand marketing?
Enhance Brand Recognition: Mascots are a memorable and recognizable element of a brand’s marketing campaign. They can help to create a visual identity for a brand and make it more recognizable to consumers. For example, when it comes to The Walt Disney Company, there’s no one who does not think of Mickey Mouse. An anthropomorphic, adorable mouse represented Disney in the public eye with a unique and novel image that remains a Disney icon today. This mascot successfully enhances brand recognition.
Increase Engagement: Mascots are perfect for interacting with audiences in a variety of marketing and advertising campaigns. The friendly and interesting image of mascots means that people do not easily reject such cute things, which facilitates the establishment of a safe and cordial relationship between mascots and customers. Meanwhile, mascots, as faceless images, are good at avoiding the risks that celebrities and real people may bring. After all, if a real celebrity’s reputation is damaged by some issues, the brand the person endorses will also have trouble.
Enhance Emotional Connection: Another important role of mascots is to connect brands and customers emotionally. For example, the mascot of the Duolingo App is a small green bird called Duo, evolving from a green owl, similar to the spectacled owl species in the real world, and is meant to symbolize knowledge, wisdom, and learning. When using Duolingo, he always serves as a coach to motivate users to achieve higher learning goals. Interestingly, if you don’t open the app for a long time to study, Duo will turn into an angry bird, sad bird, or crazy bird. Duo’s companion and human-like emotions make users can’t bear to let him down. Relying on the emotional connection Dou has with users, Duolingo maintains high user stickiness.
Ways to Use Mascots in Your Marketing Strategy?
Shaping brand culture with mascots
Mascots are not only cute things but also carriers of brand culture. The image of a mascot is hardly limited; it can be based on a person, an animal, or even an object. Importantly, no matter what the archetype is, mascots tend to appear in an anthropomorphized image in order to take on the task of spreading brand stories and shaping the company images.
if you want to let people know your brand’s stories, you can design one or a set of mascots and make use of their appearances, colors, behaviors, and voices to express the ideas you want customers to encounter.
For example, Pillsbury Company is a cake manufacturer, so how did it inspire the birth of the mascot Pillsbury Doughboy? This mascot is based on refrigerated dough, an essential raw material for cakes. Meanwhile, the designer gave it a faint blush and a soft, warm chuckle when poked on the belly. White, soft, and warm, are brand features the company tries to let people know, and each one you can perceive from the mascot. Meanwhile, its anthropomorphization enhances its interaction with customers. This successful case shows that a suitable mascot is the best one, and the creation of it requires a deep understanding and application of company culture.
Using mascots in advertising
Offline Activities: Mascots can appear at offline events, host launches, fan meetings, and interact with the audience. Also, mascots can be made into plushies and other small gifts to be distributed to the audience, becoming small elements in the customers’ lives and reminding them of your brand.
Content Marketing Campaign Online: A common method is to have a mascot appear in advertisements. This method has made so many brands and their mascots popular. For example, what Mitsubishi did was to use a clumsy, big fluffy polar bear in contrast with their stable, fierce, and massive vehicles. In fact, the ad was so well received that the clumsy bear and its big car became one of Mitsubishi’s icons.
Updated Advertising Methods: As time goes by, more new media tools are being used for advertising. Mascots, as anthropomorphic images, are no longer limited to purely virtual images or physical plush toys. Technologies such as AR/VR have made it possible to merge the web and the reality, which has also brought new ways of mascot advertising. Carolina Panthers’ Mixed-Reality Beast is a good example. Making use of VR, a beast appeared on top of the Bank of America building like a real monster, leaving deep impression on audiences.
Shaping Employee Identity through Mascots
Mascots not only play an important role in promoting brands to the outside public but can also have a positive effect on the brand’s internal employees. Mascots can serve as symbols of an organization’s values, culture, and identity, helping to create a sense of unity and belonging among employees. Imagine having a cute bear or a fairy bring you afternoon tea and a performance when you’re too tired to work, would you be in a better mood and no longer want to drop your computer and dash out the door of your office?
Therefore, you need to customize a mascot and cooperate with your company’s corporate culture department so that the mascot appears in various internal activities. You can give the mascot plushies as gifts to your employees, tell the mascot stories, explain the company’s culture, and enhance your employees’ sense of identity. Also, the image of the mascot is not necessarily set in stone. According to the prototype, you can design an exclusive mascot with unique characteristics for each department, which can enhance the expression of cultural diversity and ensure the consistency of the key spirit. Remember, the spirit of the mascot is not only conveyed to the customers but also to the employees.
How to customize a mascot for a brand or business event?
About mascots, the things we have to know not only how to use mascots in marketing strategy, but also how to customize a great mascot for a brand or business event. Customizing a mascot should consider these factors:
Backstories of mascots
Firstly, you have to make up an origin story for your unique mascot. What is the personality of your mascot? Will it be an object, a person, an animal, or something else? How does it fit with your brand? What kind of background will you give it? You have to consider all of these questions to decide the image of your mascot and the spirit of your brand that will be conveyed to customers.
Like Procter & Gamble’s Mr. Clean: one day, a hard-working farmer and his wife walked out their front door one day and found a bald baby cleaning the porch. They adopted the little boy, who turned out to prefer cleaning up messes to making them. The boy is Mr. Clean. He is very crazy about cleaning and really does a good job. A clean man who looks clean and has a “cleaning” background perfectly matches Procter & Gamble’s products.
An interesting and reasonable background can enrich a mascot’s personality and enhance the specific impression of a brand left in people’s hearts.
Excellent design
Good mascot design is important. Designing a mascot that aligns with a brand’s identity and ethos begins with a deep understanding of the brand’s core values, mission, and the demographic makeup of its target customers. Designers should translate these elements into visual and personality traits of mascots. Before finalizing the design, make sure that it goes well with all brand assets such as logos and color schemes.
Chosun Toys can help you in this matter. This is a company that specializes in custom plushies. It can provide you with lots of choices, including many kinds of interesting, pretty, and even odd mascot appearances and various colors, decorations, and textures.
Physical & virtual body
A brand also needs to decide what form the mascots will take. Will it be a disembodied image that exists only online, or will it appear in real life in the form of a stuffed animal or doll? I suggest you have both forms because marketing happens both online and offline. Although a physical mascot may increase costs, it can better interact with customers, and increase brand awareness and audience engagement.
Chosun Toys as a professional customization manufacturer, can help you in this issue as well. It owns mature technologies and various materials, which enable it to produce high-quality and diverse mascots. For example, the famous mascot of the Beijing Winter Olympics, Binding Dwen Dwen, was produced by this company. Bing Dwen Dwen went viral on the internet in 2022. “One Dwen at each family” once became the number four trending topic on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, with 10.38 million viewers in 24 hours, and during the Game, 1.4 million Bing Dwen Dwen were sold, accounting for 69% of all licensed products sold for the Game.
Bing Dwen Dwen produced by Chosun Toys has a cute panda face that does not deform easily and a transparent shell that hardly oxidizes. Its good workmanship and mass production capacity support the hot selling of this mascot.
Summary
A successful brand is never just about products, it carries stories, spirits and thoughts you want to share, and mascot advertising is a fruitful way of getting people to encounter a brand because it does well in telling the brand’s story to the audience. If we want to use mascots for effective campaigns, we first need to understand how to use mascots in marketing strategy. And one vital step is to design a unique and excellent mascot.
Therefore, the first step to success starts with customizing a mascot!
Thus, if you want to use this advertising method and make mascots for your brand as well, you can contact Chosunstoys to make the best mascot for your business. The popularity of Bing Dwen Dwen is a testament to what Chosunstoys can do, and maybe it can help solve your issues too.