The Death of the Mascot

My partner has an obsession with a chat app, in the form of plushies and products purchased specifically due to characters that are on them.

A round yellow one, a lion with no mane, and something I’m told is meant to be a peach?

I kept looking at them wondering how a company that makes a chat app ended up making things people spend hundreds of dollars on.

Sure, I’ve been given mascots at conferences.

An Akeneo creature I remembered as a purple octopus. Salesforce plushies, dotdigital bear. But mostly it's totes, hats or shirts with a boxy monotone logo and not something with a story besides, please rep our business.

Kakao got characters onto our shelf, into our bedroom and kitchen, all because my partner wanted them, seeks them out, and gets excited about them.

That feels like a much bigger difference than the quality of ‘merch’.

I remember mascots being more prominent in the late 90s and early 2000s. More faces attached to software, websites and ordinary businesses.

That may partly be nostalgia.

I haven’t counted mascots by decade, and maybe I get cynical that everything looks the same.

Kakao’s service catalogue puts maps, messaging, gifting and the characters in the same family.

Kakao Friends began inside chat, where a character could express annoyance, embarrassment or affection on somebody else’s behalf.

Ryan is a lion without a mane, with a reserved face and a reassuring personality.

Choonsik is a former stray cat who becomes Ryan’s roommate.

Ryan and Choonsik became a K-pop dance duo, entertainment-company collaborations, teasers, short films and a comeback schedule. These were characters being promoted like performers.

A cartoon lion has a comeback schedule.

Olive Young has a Beauty of Joseon Choonsik edition of its Relief Sun sunscreen, including a double pack with a stress ball.

But somehow, a character from a chat service has become part of the appeal of buying sunscreen.

A separate business can borrow a familiar character to make its own offer more desirable. The character brings recognition and an audience that the skincare formula alone cannot supply.

I don’t have the royalty agreement for the sunscreen, and a product listing cannot tell us how many extra units the character sold.

The marketing asset can earn money in its own right while carrying the parent brand into categories it would otherwise have no reason to enter.

I need to correct myself on Akeneo. Ziggy is a hydra, and I was told not to call it an octopus at the sales booth.

There is also a story. Akeneo introduced Ziggy as the intimidating monster of multichannel commerce, tamed into a helpful companion.

The company has celebrated the character’s birthdays and invited community artwork. It has done more than order purple toys. Akeneo’s own retrospective makes that plain.

Yet I still see this as “the purple octopus”.

That is one person’s experience, and certainly not proof the programme failed.

The object reached me more effectively than the character did.

Take a product-information company.

Its customers deal with missing images, contradictory sizes, suppliers sending the wrong spreadsheet and somebody changing a product name ten minutes before launch.

A hypothetical character might be the catalogue manager who insists everything is under control while another supplier file arrives called “FINAL_v7_ACTUAL_FINAL”.

Let them have a running problem. Let customers recognise their own week in it and suggest the next disaster.

The company would still need to make the connection back to its product. An audience with no association to the brand is an expensive entertainment hobby.

Hype has to be earned here. A “limited drop” means very little when nobody was waiting for the ordinary one.

Air New Zealand has aircraft, destinations, travellers, staff and a country full of distinctive wildlife. That is a generous supply of material for a cast.

I’d like to see how far an airline could take a continuing cast with an audience of its own.

A mascot won’t make a cancelled service acceptable. A cheerful animal delivering bad news could make it more irritating. Service still has to work. But a transport organisation could also build something people actively enjoy between the journeys they need to take.

Duolingo is the strongest objection. It has an owl people recognise beyond the language app, a cast around him and merchandise built from their personalities. It shows a Western software company can do this, if they do it right.

Sport is another obvious one. Gritty and other mascots give supporters a personality to play with beyond the score. Fans already know how to care about a character attached to a business.

So What.

Copying Kakao’s output would be expensive, and most characters will never support a licensing business.

You cant do it.

But copying the ambition is available to a much smaller company: make someone your customers want to hear from, and give them something to follow, that’s not a beige or monotone tinged tv ad, that was meant to exude ‘minimalism’.

My partner wanted those Kakao Friends plushies enough to bring them home, and keep buying more, even though we are living in a country where Kakao is not part of everyday life.

I’d love to see more of the businesses I encounter give me that feeling before they put another toy in my bag.

Embrace the chaos, bring back the mascot.

Shout out to all the legends I've ripped info from for this piece:

Kakao | Kakao Friends | Olive Young | IPX | Akeneo | Salesforce | Air New Zealand | Google | Duolingo