Each and every one of us probably has seen Colonel Sanders in advertisements for KFC. Or maybe the characters we saw in the Tokyo Olympics, cartoon Miraitowa. These two are examples of brand mascots, who represent their brands in a unique way by using a character as a mascot.
Today, we’ll be discussing brand mascots and how to use them to bring your products to stand out.
Brand Mascot
A brand mascot is a character created for a company to define their brand’s identity or act as the brand avatar, or also your company’s representative. This character may be used in your company’s logo or in various marketing materials you use for your products or services, digital and print.
Mascot origins from the French word “mascotte”, which means lucky charm. Mascots are believed to be the conveyer of good luck and positive energy for years. This fact strengthens the popular use of mascots in the design for user experience and marketing goals, as they bring a direct connection to conversions and profit by drawing positive feedback and emotional appeal.
A good brand mascot may help products to build effective communication with users. Usually, mascots are derived from objects, animals, people, or fictional characters which can be applied in logos, icons, websites, merchandise, and even mobile applications.
In addition, a brand mascot gives a broader horizon of personification for your business that works more effectively than product endorsement by a famous person. A catchy mascot creates a memorable and recognizable visual that bears the brand identity. This brand mascot also acts as an enhancer of communication between a brand or product with its audience.
Also read: 5 Examples of Creative Brand Video and Why You Need One!
How to Use Mascot in Your Marketing Strategies
Here are several essential steps you must go through to create a great mascot for your brand.
1. Choose the right type of mascots – characters and personality
There are several types of mascots you can choose for your brand marketing.
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Human Characters
Human characters as a brand mascot are used by some brands hoping to make the designs more interactive and relatable, as it is represented by a real person.
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Humanized Animals
This kind of character is often used by family-focused consumer brands or brands whose targets are kids. Humanized animals are easy to animate and often linger in the viewer’s mind as it is unique and unforgettable.
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Humanized Products
Humanizing your product might be the easiest way to convey your message directly to your target audience. This type of character piques the viewer’s interest as brands can have their products do the things humans do, such as talking, walking, etc.
In choosing the right type of mascot for your brand, you should first consider the type of audience your brand is reaching. A humanized character might be more appealing to a kid rather than a human character. You need to carefully choose the type of mascot and the color schemes or any other elements you use in your brand, which depends on the audience you’re targeting despite the fact that every type of mascot works well with all types of audience.
After you choose the right type of mascots or characters you’re going to use for your brand marketing, you should also define your character’s personality. Your mascot may be sweet, funny, sarcastic, or even have all these three characteristics combined.
The position in which the character will communicate with your audience is necessary to determine. Your mascot may become a teacher or a student. A mascot as a teacher teaches the audience about the niche and services. Whereas if you make your mascot as a student, then your character will learn about the products or services along with the audience.
2. Arrange Your Visual and Content Marketing Strategy
By creating a rough visual and content arrangement in advance, you may elucidate what you need and plan a better budget.
Firstly, you may need to think about the story of your character. This may help you to have a lot of creative content ideas and help with your content plan. Start building your character’s adventures with a few pinpoints. Starting from here you’ll start having creative ideas on how to develop your character.
Then, use your character, both for your website, blog posts, social media, or even video content. You can either use your character in the then images on your website or let your character be the teacher who provides your audience with valuable information. You can also use your mascot as a profile image for your social media page, cover image for your Youtube channel, etc. Using your character on your profile or thumbnails help your brand to be more recognizable when people scroll through their feed.
3. Choose The Poses and Actions of Your Character
Before deciding what kind of pose and action, or emotions your character will bear, you must first find out how you want to use your mascot.
There are some emotions you can consider for your mascot to express. You should suit these emotions to the personality that you created for your character. Your character should also pose and act according to the context you’re using it for. Outfits and scenes can also help you put your brand mascot in various contexts and make your character look more alive.
This cute and grumpy antibiotic pill created by Superpixel is a good example of a brand mascot. This project is aimed to inform the general public that “Antibiotics kill bacteria, but do not kill the flu viruses.”
