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Brand Mascot China: Why your Brand needs Its Own Brand Character?

Brand Mascot in China can boost your brand identity and your inbound marketing effectiveness. This article aims to introduce you to how Brand mascots should be created, how they should be used, and how they can benefit your business.

 

 

Create A Brand Mascot Aligned With Your Brand Identity

 

Every Brand has its own personality, determined by the message you want to communicate and the consumer you want to appeal to. A Brand Personality is a framework that allows a company or organization shape the way people feel about its products, services and mission. Brand Mascots are among the best ways to express a Brand identity. In the following sections, we’ll explore why.

What Is A Brand Mascot / Brand Character?

A Brand Mascot is the physical manifestation of a brand personality or identity, in the form of an animal, plant, or other animated object, which stands as a spokesperson for a company or product.

The Importance Of Brand Identity

Brand Identity Definition

Brand Identity comprises the visible elements of a Brand, which identify and distinguish it from other brands in the consumer's mind. 

brand character mascot brand identity

Brand Identity Elements

Many different visual elements contribute to a Brand Identity, including colors, logos, motifs, verbal tone, mascots, and so on.

Once the visual and textual elements are defined, the Brand Identity will provide a basis for the Brand Image. The Brand Image can be positive or negative, depending on how the audience perceives the Brand Identity.

Building Your Brand Identity

There are several steps to building your Brand Identity: 

Analyze your Brand’s Strengths and Weaknesses

Knowing where your Brand performs strongly, and where it is sub-optimal, will allow you to focus on elements where you have a genuine value advantage. Playing to your strengths is the key to building a strong Brand Identity.

Survey the market to determine Opportunities and Threats

Building a SWOT is a good way to leverage your findings from Step 1 in building your Brand Identity. Knowing your brand and its positioning relative to the external environment is an important foundation for subsequent work.

Determine your Business Goals and build the Brand Identity around them

Your Brand Identity should be aligned with your vision and goals to ensure that you are communicating the correct message. Therefore, before you begin, you have to define the goals you are targeting. 

brand mascot business goal

Identify your Customers and build an appropriate Persona 

Once you define your positioning, environment and goals, you need to determine who you are targeting. Sometimes, the same message should be conveyed differently to different audiences. Be sure you identify them first!

Choose the Brand Personality that best represent you

At this stage, you should have a better idea of your objectives. According to what you have set out in the previous steps; you should be able to describe and define the personality you will give to your Brand.

Define the Brand Identity that best suits your Brand Personality

Finally, how should you fully realize the Brand Personality? Which colors are most appropriate for your “cool” brand? What tone should you use to communicate with your customers? Everything should be finalized in this stage of the process, including your future Brand Mascot ;)

Now that you realize the importance of the Brand Identity, let’s move on to learn about Brand Mascots. 

How Can Mascots Boost Your Brand Identity?

As we have already said, the Brand identity is made up of colors, fonts, graphics, tones of messages – it is a sum of many parts. 

Having a Brand Mascot makes your Brand identity stronger, for several reasons.

Represent Your Brand

First of all, it gives your brand a face, voice and tone. The Brand Mascot itself has a visual and vocal signature, and even distinct body language and behavior. As such, it is the most complete way to represent your brand, and one of the most direct ways to communicate. 

brand mascot brand identity

Connect With Your Audience

Moreover, a Brand Mascot allows you to connect more effectively with your audience. A personified brand recreates the sense of human contact, and makes it easier to connect with your customers.

Be Recognizable

A Brand Character is also a way to be recognizable and memorable in a crowded marketplace. We all think of Frosties cereal when we see Tony the Tiger, or Lacoste when we catch sight of the iconic green lizard. Brand Mascots are assuredly a huge advantage in terms of brand recognition and differentiation.

How To Create A Brand Mascot

As we have shown, your Brand Mascot should not be chosen at random; you have to think carefully about how its design will most accurately represent your Brand Identity and Personality. 

Designing a Brand Mascot is easier when you have clearly defined the type of emotion you want to evoke, and the message you want to convey.

Brand mascot creation design

Picture: Floob Creative Design Agency

Picking the right character

Would you prefer an object to represent your brand, or would you rather choose an animal? Do you think a particular animal has a meaning in your culture that will accurately reflect your brand? The appearance of your Mascot is vital, but the connotations and cultural significance are also important to consider. Don’t forget also to check if your chosen animal or object is associated with less appropriate things in other countries your company may operate in!

Give your Mascot a personality

A Mascot is more than a design; it is a powerful means of expressing your values. 

Would you rather be represented in an advertisement by a Laughing Cow that connotes joy and goodwill, or by the audacious and provocative Benny the Bull?

These mascots may look similar, but as they have completely different personalities, the values they communicate are also completely different.

Here are some examples of mascots and personality traits, for inspiration:

  • Mickey Mouse: Kind, Optimistic and Brave
  • Lucky The Leprechaun: Sprightly and Cheerful
  • Jolly Green Giant: Strong and Kind 
  • Rich Uncle Pennybags (Monopoly): Joyful and Bon Viveur
  • Tony the Tiger: Strong, Cool and Charming
  • Mister Clean: Responsible, Friendly and Reliable
  • Coco the Monkey: Cool, Cute and Joyful

The perceived personality of your Mascot is sure to impact the value of your brand.

Align with your Marketing strategy

Your Brand Mascot should be aligned not only with your Brand identity, but also with your Marketing Strategy. Who are you targeting? What product or promotion do you plan to focus on? These are important items to nail down before finalizing your Brand Character design.

Design your character

Good to go? Let’s continue, and get to the fun part: the design. In other words, how you can visually translate all the desired emotions, values, feelings your audience!

Everything about your Mascot’s appearance – its facial expression, body language, voice and tone, attire and activities – gives you plenty of areas to apply your creativity.

brand mascot design characterPicture: Floob Creative Design Agency

Branding Your Mascot 

Congratulations! You now know how to create a Brand Mascot. Next, you need to know how to ensure your audience will adopt it.

How To Introduce A Brand Character

Once your Brand Mascot has been designed, you have to organize various campaigns you want it to appear in. This step involves asking some questions of yourself, such as:

  • Where will you use your mascot?
  • What channels will you use to communicate?
  • Will you use the mascot from the start (i.e. the launch of the brand) or only during a special event or promotion? 
  • Will the mascot represent your entire product range or only one product?
  • What platform(s) will you use to launch the campaign?

Adding Value To Your Brand With A Brand Character

A Brand Mascot is sure to add value to your Brand. Not only will it help you build a distinct identity, but it will also involve your audience in engaging conversations

Let’s go over the reasons why having a Brand Mascot will make a difference:

Establishing a distinct and recognizable personality

Because a mascot consists of many recognizable characteristics, it gives the Brand a more complete and discernible personality, which the customer can relate to.

After even a brief encounter with your product, the customer will imbibe your Brand Personality and experience the emotions it has been designed to convey.

Building an emotional connection with your audience

Furthermore, the emotional connection may be deeper than it would be in the case of a Brand without a mascot. Indeed, unlike standard trademarks and logos, mascots are capable of expressing emotions, and their personality has the effect of humanizing them. Therefore, the likelihood of emotional acceptance is higher than in the case of a logo or tagline, both of which are less emotionally appealing.

The marketing platform Mailchimp is a good example. The firm uses a Monkey Mascot, called Freddie, to interact with their audience. Here, for instance, is Freddie is giving the user a ‘high five’ when a campaign email is ready to be sent.

brand mascot Mailchimp

Engaging the audience in conversation 

Last but not least, a mascot is the perfect tool for marketing in today’s world. In an era of social media, social commerce is fast becoming the norm. 

Mascots can be used at several stages of the customer journey, and could even be the voice your Brand, which you use to speak with your audience.

The Gecko from Geico insurance is a leading example of successful social media interaction fronted by a brand mascot. Gecko, a wise-cracking lizard, has represented the company since 1999. The mascot was originally brought into being in response to the Screen Actors Guild strike, which prevented advertisers from using live actors in TV advertisements.

The Geico Brand team adapted their approach once again in the social media era, using Gecko as their main ambassador online. The mascot now has almost 25,000 followers on Instagram, where they can see his adventures and even interact with him personally.

4 Ways To Use A Branding Mascot

Depending on your Brand Identity, strategy and audience, you may use your mascot differently. For example, you could use it for:

Your logo 

The logo is the core element of your Brand identity. If you want your mascot to be a strong element of your Brand, incorporating it into your logo is a no-brainer.

Your packaging

Promoting products is one of the main reasons why brands use a mascot in the first place. Therefore, it needs to appear on your packaging to differentiate your product from the competition.

brand mascot packaging

Your marketing documents and website

 Depending on the type of message or products you are promoting, your mascot should appear on your marketing documents and website at least to some degree. If your Brand Mascot is at the center of your marketing strategy, it should appear at each step on the customer journey (e.g. adding it to your Favicon, etc.).

Your social media

As previously seen with Gecko, a Brand mascot can have its own social media following, independently from the official Brand channel, and talk about its adventures. It is also possible for a mascot to remain more in the background, in order to leave ‘marketing space’ for the products themselves. In contrast to Gecko, the Jolly Green Giant appears in some social media posts, but does not have his own Instagram account.

 

When Brand Mascots Are Valuable Assets

Still not convinced yet that a Brand mascot can change the marketing game? 

Here are some more ways it can help:

A Brand Mascot to improve your business effectiveness

There are multiple tactics that you can deploy to increase business effectiveness when using a mascot. Among them, targeting your “fans” is top of the list.

According to Scott Ginsberg, “A customer is someone who comes to a store to buy a lamp and never comes back. Fans crave experiences unlike any others.”

Derivative products 

Derivative products are a good way to increase revenue beyond your Brand’s products. Familiar examples include apparel with the Mickey Mouse logo, or figurines of video game characters such as Zelda. Such products are part of the Intellectual Property (IP) Licensing industry. When the audience for such derivative products is well targeted, you create a strong lever to increase your revenue.

brand mascot derivative products

Repeat purchase

A mascot can also help your brand by triggering repeat purchases. For companies with high production costs this is vital, as they only see a return on investment when a buyer purchases more than one product.

If repeat purchasing is a core KPI, you will achieve it more easily if your customer base has an emotional connection to your Brand’s mascot.

Retainer

A Brand mascot also act as a retainer for your audience. The emotional attachment, once developed, triggers loyalty and makes your fanbase less likely to try new products.

 

CONCLUSION

Defining the elements of your Brand Identity is the first step when creating a Brand mascot. You need to be clear on your Brand’s strengths, weaknesses, and external environment, and establish a definite vision, message and set of business goals.

Once these are clear in your mind, you have the foundations to ensure that your mascot’s design and personality will reflect your business and its objectives. Furthermore, you must decide how, where and when you want your Brand Mascot to appear, and set your marketing strategy accordingly.

When a mascot is aligned with a company Brand and is introduced as part of a well-planned strategy, it can be an extremely valuable asset for your business.

 

CONTACT DUHNO MARKETING TO CRAFT AND DEVELOP THE PERFECT BRAND MASCOT STRATEGY

Duhno is a Brand Mascot Marketing Agency dedicated in the growth of Digital Footprint and Inbound Marketing techniques in China.

With offices in Shanghai and Shenzhen, Duhno guides your team with the right strategy to adopt for your Chinese audience and creates memorable stories to make your brand’s mascot famous.