Beastly branding01 Dec
The owl of hootsuite.com
In my previous post, I talked about brand mascots: when to use them to boost your brand, and when to avoid them.
After the blog post was published, one of my blog readers pointed out that the majority of brand mascots are, in fact, animals.
This prompted me to do a bit more digging into the subject, and here’s what I found: a very interesting paper by Professor Stephen Brown from Ulster Business School: Where the wild brands are: some thoughts on anthropomorphic marketing.1
The paper gives many examples of companies using animals as brand mascots, and discusses which beasts are most popular.
Ronald McDonald
Throughout history, humankind has had a love-hate relationship with wild animals. On the one hand, we fear and detest powerful predators, especially those that destroy our crops and kill our livestock. On the other hand, we envy and admire their speed and grace, adorn ourselves in their fur and feathers, and worship them as totemic deities who symbolise our tribes, our teams, our territories.2
In branding, mascots became popular a century ago in France, when almost every company adorned its products with friendly looking cats, dogs and insects. Interestingly, fictional people’s characters have also been used quite successfully in branding. For example, the 116-year old Michelin man is still alive and well-known.
Brown concludes that fictional human characters are most popular brand mascots, followed by birds, domestic animals, and wild animals (so, SCHMOOZY FOX is still doing okay here!). Insects, aquatic creatures, vegetables and body parts (!) have much less popularity, although I would imagine that some friendly insects such as bees and lady birds are okay to use!
The main rule of thumb is that “Brand animal popularity is directly related to the species’ physiological and psychological distance from humankind.”3 The closer the species to the human kind, the easier it is for people to “process” a brand mascot.
In terms of animals, domestic and wild, it’s interesting to see that different countries might attribute different qualities to the same animal. So, study the character of your brand beast well before you go global!
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2 Responses to “Beastly branding”
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Thanks for referring to my article, Olga. It was a spin-off from a much larger project called The Penguin’s Progress, which is available as a free download from my website. Incidentally, although my data show that there is indeed a direct relationship between the popularity of brand animals and their percieved “distance” from humankind — I call this The Great Chain of Branding — it’s important to remember that the most distinctive brand beasts are also the most uncommon (bees and ladybirds aren’t particularly common mascots but they are very distinctive because of that). As we all know, standing out from the crowd is all-important in branding.
Stephen,
many thanks for your comment, and for the background about The Penguin’s Progress. It must be a great source of inspiration for any branding specialists out there.
–Olga