Brand Mascots

And Other Marketing Animals

Stephen Brown, Sharon Ponsonby-McCabe, Stephen Brown, Sharon Ponsonby-McCabe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134053902
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Tony the Tiger. The Pillsbury Doughboy. The Michelin Man. The Playboy bunny. The list of brand mascots, spokes-characters, totems and logos goes on and on and on.

Mascots are one of the most widespread modes of marketing communication and one of the longest established. Yet, despite their ubiquity and utility, brand mascots seem to be held in comparatively low esteem by the corporate cognoscenti. This collection, the first of its kind, raises brand mascots' standing, both in an academic sense and from a managerial perspective.

Featuring case studies and empirical analyses from around the world – here Hello Kitty, there Aleksandr Orlov, beyond that Angry Birds – the book presents the latest thinking on beast-based brands, broadly defined. Entirely qualitative in content, it represents a readable, reliable resource for marketing academics, marketing managers, marketing students and the consumer research community. It should also prove of interest to scholars in adjacent fields, such as cultural studies, media studies, organisation studies, anthropology, sociology, ethology and zoology.

1

MASCOT MANIA

Monkeys, meerkats, Martians and more

Stephen Brown

Going ape

Ten years ago, the trade magazine Marketing Week polled the great British public about brand mascots (Charles 2003). A representative sample of the country’s stouthearted citizens was asked to nominate their favourite advertising icon. This was not an easy decision, needless to say, since there were so many terrific trade characters to choose from. The Honey Monster, the Milky Bar Kid, Captain Birdseye, Bertie Bassett, the Tango Man and Tetley’s tannin-addledTea Folks all had their supporters, as did Johnny English, a bumbling front man for MasterCard, who went on to star in a series of blockbuster movies.¹ However the runaway winners, with 20 per cent of the total vote, were the PG Tips Chimps. Spokes-simians for Britain’s premier brand of tea, the nattering troupe made their first television appearance in 1956 and, attired in diverse costumes from floral pinafores to bowler hats, they got into all sorts of silly scrapes and jolly japes involving physical exertion and liquid refreshment. The only ad I can remember involved two boiler-suited chimps manoeuvring an oversized piano down a narrow staircase, which ended with the peerless punch-line: ‘“Dad, do you know the piano’s on my foot?” “You hum it, son, I’ll play it!”’

Ah, they don’t make commercials like that anymore.²

PG Tips’ troupe of chimps was finally pensioned off in 2002, apparently as a sop to animal rights activists. Apart from occasional mentions in the media, such as the anguished obituary of Louis, a Tips’ stalwart who joined the choir invisible in July 2013, Britain’s favourite brand mascots have gone to a better place, the borne from whence no spokes-character returns. Indeed, a more recent survey of much-loved mascots reveals that the once-imperious chimps aren’t even in the nation’s top ten (Kemp 2010). The Smash Martians are still very popular, despite a much longer absence from our screens, as is the Honey Monster and Captain Birdseye and Tony the Tiger and analogous American interlopers. But there’s no sign of the chimps, even though troupe leader Choppers is still alive and well and quaffing cups of tea in Twycross Zoo. Presumably, she pauses occasionally to regale passers-by with that cri-de-coeur of has-been celebrities, ‘I used to be somebody!’

The adverts may have got small, darling, but all is not lost on the monkey mascot front (Tylee 2010). After dallying with claymation pigeons in the post-primate hiatus, PG Tips hooked up with a sock-puppet simian in 2007. An alumnus of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, ‘Monkey’ made his mark as the spokes-stocking for ITV Digital, a satellite television service that never got off the ground. Luckily, the cable-knit critter survived the debacle and, partnered by Johnny Vegas, a slobbish stand-up comedian with an impenetrable northern accent, this unlikely pairing has been a big hit with tea drinkers and the general public alike. The duo’s ads replicate classic movie scenes and iconic television moments, such as When Harry Met Sally’s renowned restaurant sequence and Morecambe and Wise’s celebrated breakfast sketch. Monkey has even starred in a short film, A Tale of Two Continents, which was screened in cinemas before showings of Horton Hears a Who and The Spiderwick Chronicles. Although the sock-puppet’s precise species is indeterminate, Monkey remains one of the few brand mascots to have successfully fronted separate campaigns for contrasting products. True, this transfer of allegiance was not without IP jiggery-pokery. Mother, the advertising agency behind the ITV Digital campaign, maintained that Monkey was their intellectual property and legal proceedings duly ensued.³ But the bottom line is that their mascot-for-hire has become a free agent, nothing less than the George Clooney, the David Beckham, the Maria Sharapova, the Kim Kardashian of spokes-hosiery. There’s no reason why he can’t shill several brands simultaneously with a smile and a simper.

At least the sock puppet’s career has legs, which is more than can be said for the one-hit-wonder that was Cadbury’s drumming gorilla. Aired in August 2007, the ninety-second ad for a bar of chocolate featured an anthropomorphic silverback sitting at a drum kit beating time to Phil Collins’ ‘In the AirTonight’. Not only was it a social media sensation and the source of innumerable YouTube parodies – Wonderbra’s springs to mind for some unfathomable reason – but it boosted the sales of Dairy Milk by 9 per cent or so. It also did much to restore the reputation of Cadbury’s which had been hit by contamination incidents and food hygiene scares at the firm’s venerable factory in Bournville, Birmingham. The ad won several prestigious awards, what’s more, including a Grand Prix Lion at Cannes, advertising’s equivalent of the Oscars. It likewise benefited from consumer rumours that Phil Collins himself was inside the gorilla suit, though the rock star denied any involvement with a self-deprecating quip: ‘He’s a better drummer than me … And he’s got more hair!’ Phil was still smiling, I suspect, when sales of his back catalogue soared in the landmark ad’s aftermath.

Above and beyond the benefits that accrued to the brand, Cadbury’s drumming gorilla is a market research morality tale. I’ve been reliably informed that focus groups unilaterally and unequivocally rejected the idea before the ad was broadcast. I’ve been further informed that the brand manager who overruled the negative research findings – and ran the ad regardless – effectively pinned his career prospects on the great ape’s product pitching prowess.⁴ It was a big call; a £6.2 million call, no less. However, the world went wild for his wildcard call and it echoes around CadburyWorld to this day, where the visitor attraction’s ‘Advertising Avenue’ includes a live-action recreation of the memorable spot. The gorilla, sadly, didn’t go on to greater things, let alone grow into his role as a drum-beating brand ambassador. However, there’s nothing to stop him making a silverback comeback when the wheel of advertising icons turns back time and hirsute Collins impersonators are in vogue once more.

Wild thing

While waiting for the primate to reprise his paradiddle sales pitch, I should perhaps point out that brand mascots live in a Darwinian world where the survival of the fittest prevails (Dotz and Husain 2003). The Tips’ chimps’ imperial reign, Monkey’s successful reinvention and Paul the drumming gorilla’s moment of glory embody the law of the marketing jungle, which is red in tooth and claw and advertising impressions. It’s a definitional jungle as well, insofar as the terminology is all over the place. Consider Cadbury’s gorilla. Is it a brand mascot or an advertising character or a brand icon or a trade character or an advertising spokes-creature or, according to Mendenhall’s (1990) preferred terminology, a character trademark? Or none of the foregoing? Or something else entirely? What about the Tips’ chimps? Ditto the multitalented Monkey?

Although animals are integral to marketing communication, there is no consensus on what mascots, icons, characters, spokes-creatures and suchlike are exactly. The terms are used synonymously, interchangeably and pretty imprecisely, let’s be honest, though that’s hardly unusual in marketing. Definitional divergence is one of the hallmarks of our discipline. Every concept we come up with, be it ‘value’, ‘involvement’, ‘relationships’, ‘sustainability’, ‘materialism’, ‘segmentation’ or whatever, is beset by competing definitions and not a little learned disputation.

A few brave explorers of marketing’s animal kingdom, nevertheless, have tried to tie things down and tighten them up. Barbara Phillips (1996) distinguishes between animate and inanimate characters, trademarked and non-trademarked characters, fictional and real characters, and trade and celebrity characters, concluding that ‘a trade character is a fictional, animate being or animated object that has been created for the promotion of a product, service or idea’ (146). Callcott and Lee (1995) contend, after summarizing the evolution of marketing’s spokes-creatures, that the physical appearance of the character, the medium it appears in, its origin in advertising or elsewhere, and its passive or active promotion of the product are key when it comes to making sense of trademark symbolism. Cohen (2014) claims that a seven-category continuum of brand embodiment, ranging from cartoon characters and costumed actors to depersonalized people and fictitious human figureheads, can be readily identified beneath the mascot morass. In a similar vein, Stern (1988) separates real life and fictional personifications, cartoon and non-cartoon personifications, animal and fabulous personifications and draws special attention to ‘food figure’ personifications such as the rockin’ Californian Raisins and that debonair man-about-town, Mr Peanut.

Admirable though they are, such definitions don’t help draw a line between mascots, icons, characters, spokes-creatures and nominative nouns yet to be invented (Callcott and Phillips 1996). Mascots, moreover, are only one aspect of marketing’s zoolatry (Connell 2013). Our exploitation of ‘dumb’ animals isn’t limited to icons. Logos are littered with critters of every imaginable stripe, as are adverts and packages and flyers and posters and home pages and what have you. The ailment or affliction or annoyance that a product is designed to eradicate – pet odours, household germs, garden weeds, nasal congestion, etc.⁵ – is animated by advertisers as a matter of routine. There’s nothing, what’s more, to prevent an animal image, such as the black horse on Lloyd’s Bank logo, becoming a fully-fledged mascot by the simple act of animation. Put a few words in its mouth (‘the bank that likes to say neigh’, say) and suddenly you’ve got a spokes-stallion that puts Barclays’ silent, static eagle to shame.

It would be easy to get embroiled in definitional matters, as we nit-picking academics are wont to do. The continuing absence of consensus on what constitutes a brand is a cautionary tale for ivory tower dwellers who like their definitions neat, tight and precise (de Chernatony 2010). When ‘mascot’ and its near synonyms are appended to the imponderable that is ‘brand’, then you’ve got the makings of an OCD disaster among the hair-tearing hair-splitters of academe. At this stage in the proceedings it is sufficient to note that: (a) marketing has an animal fixation; (b) the entire animal kingdom is fair game; (c) some animal orders are more popular with marketers than others; (d) specific species wax and wane in popularity through time, as Spears and Germain (2007) show; (e) the brand animal inventory includes humans, super-humans, extraterrestrials, deities, demons, dinosaurs, monsters, spectres, cyborgs, androids and all sorts of ordinarily inanimate objects such as rocks, ropes, rolling pins and root vegetables; (f) branding’s beasts of burden are employed in a variety of capacities, everything from garrulous glad-handling spokes-creatures to silent symbols on the corporate coat of arms; and (g) that our critters can take on a life of their own, transcend the brand that bore them, and become part and parcel of popular culture.

Simples minded

Nowhere is mascot transcendence better illustrated than in the case of Aleksandr Orlov (Patterson et al. 2013). The brand mascot for a price comparison website, Aleksandr is an aristocratic animatronic meerkat. Resplendent in a red velvet smoking jacket and natty silk cravat, Orlov harangues ignorant consumers who confuse his genealogical website, compare the meerkat dotcom, with a cheap and cheerful car insurance seller, comparethemarket.com. He does so in an exaggerated Russian accent and with more than a little disdain for the computer keyboard fumblers among Britain’s brutish bargain hunters. Armed with flip charts and a pointer, Orlov impatiently explains the difference between his exclusive website, which is solely devoted to the illustrious lineage of a patrician animal species, and the decidedly plebeian process of getting a better deal on car insurance. Stop soiling my website with your grubby queries, he commands, since even the most simple-minded of Britain’s ill-educated underclass must surely recognize that meerkat and market are different words!

From such unpropitious beginnings a mascot cult was born. The first meerkat ad was broadcast in January 2009 and, less than a year later, Aleksandr had catapulted comparethemarket.com from an also-ran car insurance company to the fourth most visited website in the country (Brown 2010). His catchphrase ‘Simples’ became part of the British vernacular and, thanks to a canny social media campaign involving an actual meerkat website with parody mongoose comparisons, quickly acquired 700,000 Facebook fans and 22,000 followers on Twitter. The mascot’s momentum was maintained by an extended series of follow-up adverts which fleshed out the Muscovite mammal’s back story while making marketing hay from the meerkat/market homophone. VCCP, the advertising agency behind the campaign, then turned to an epic retelling of the Orlov dynasty’s eventful history, including their exodus from southern Africa, their life-or-death struggles in Siberia, their ghettoization in a muskrat-infested quarter of old Moscow and their triumphant acquisition of stately homes in England’s green and pleasant land. The mighty meerkats’ moves made the wandering of the Jews look like a walk in the park.

At this juncture, approximately two years after the campaign started, creative lassitude could have set in. The Simples catchphrase was losing its lustre and competing comparison websites were coming up with irritating mascots of their own, most notably the Go Compare opera singer who belted out excruciating arias with exuberant abandon (Shearman 2011). VCCP responded with a classic mascot tactic: more meerkats! A fictional village, Meerkovo, was invented and populated with copious quirky characters and iddy-biddy meerkats. Prior to that, though, they prepared the ground with Aleksandr’s ‘autobiography’, which was published to widespread acclaim (Hattersley 2010) and with more than a modicum of hyperbole (Orlov 2010). Lavishly illustrated and loosely translated from the original language, whatever that was, it shot straight to the top of Britain’s bestsellers list – non-fiction category, naturally – and remained there throughout the Christmas gift-giving season. You couldn’t make it up, though a ghost writer obviously did. Unless it was Cadbury’s gorilla, of course …

By rights, Aleksandr’s brief career should have been downhill all the way thereafter. But the canny Cossack still had one or two tricks up the sleeve of his smoking jacket. Apart from Meerkovo and its associated range of collectible cuddly toys – get them while they’re hot! – these included the sponsorship of Britain’s longest-running television soap opera, Coronation Street, an imaginary altercation with Maurice Wigglethorpe-Throom, the infuriated owner of comparethemarket.com whose innocent website Aleksandr had incessantly slandered, and a series of genre-hopping advertising adventures, such as a Rocky Balboa rip-off and a Mission Impossible spoof (Patterson et al. 2013). Given the vast range of cinematic genres that this simples manoeuvre makes available (Neale 2002), there’s no reason why he can’t continue to captivate British consumers for the foreseeable future. A compare the meerkat theme park must be a very real possibility. It worked for Hello Kitty, Peppa Pig and Angry Birds, after all, as well as Ireland’s imperishable Mr Tayto, whose potato-themed facility is one of the country’s top ten tourist attractions (Maguire 2013). Meerkat World, Meerkova Towers, Meerkat Litter, or whatever they choose to call it, could soon be up there with Legoland, Busch Gardens and the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. You read it here first.

According to Miles (2014), the popularity of Orlov’s progress is attributable to the societal contradictions that the campaign raises and assuages. In accordance with Holt’s (2004) principles of cultural branding, he contends that the simmering issue of rising immigration, especially from Eastern European members of the ever-growing EU, is addressed and alleviated by the mocked and mocking meerkat. Miles notes, furthermore, how the accession of a mee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface: Putting the ark into marketing
• 1 Mascot mania: Monkeys, meerkats, Martians and more
• SECTION I Man
• SECTION II Beast
• SECTION III Wild
• SECTION IV Crazy
• Conclusion
• Index