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4 Ways a Brand Mascot Can Make Your Business More Personable
A brand mascot can breathe new life into your business. Leverage this powerful tool to expand your brand and reach new demographics.
Mascots are the faces that lend your brand a distinct personality, which in turn differentiates you from the vast sea that is the business world. They can be based on people, anthropomorphic animals, or personified objects, as long as they represent your brand and resonate with your audience.
The primary purpose of a mascot is to help build and strengthen brand identity. It’s also a good way to reinforce top-of-mind awareness. When people see your mascot in a constant basis, they become more primed to put your business in their mind map. Come checkout time, your business will be the first thing they’ll think about. In other words, you’ll be their official go-to brand.
Can you grasp the magnitude of this? Your mascot will become your ageless brand representative that can endure different times and trends to keep your business strong. When used optimally, it can breathe new life to your company at the dawn of every era. And the best thing is that it costs almost nothing to set up and maintain!
If the reasons above are still not enough to convince you to get a brand mascot, perhaps the following will:
Building an emotional connection with the audience
A 2013 study published in the Journal of Marketing Management claimed, “Brand mascots reflect a deeply rooted human tendency to understand the world through anthropomorphic objects.” This means that humans are hard-wired to see the human side of everything. That’s just the way we are and the way we see the world. We like assigning human characteristics to animals and objects because it helps us make an emotional connection with them. We can understand them better when we have obvious similarities.
Taking this into perspective, it’s now easy to see why mascots are so effective in capturing people’s hearts and emotions. They are the faces we can trust — the faces that lend faceless businesses a personality. They are the living entities that we can turn to when we need a reason to connect with a brand.
Establishing a distinct and recognizable personality
Uniqueness and differentiation are two of the most important things that a business should possess in the now-saturated economic industry. Fortunately, this is where a brand mascot can help. A mascot is essentially an extension of your business that explores the more creative and customer-centric side of your brand. By personifying your brand, it creates an emotional bond that bridges the gap between you and your target audience.
The said bond can create a sense of continuity that can make your customers feel more at ease and comfortable with your business. The mascot will assure them that they’re dealing with something familiar and reliable.
Engaging the audience in conversation
Brand mascots that easily connect with customers are more likely to inspire them to engage in conversation. Compared to flat logos and faceless corporate staffers, mascots can actively encourage customers to take part in brand-related activities.
However, there’s an important caveat you have to remember: In order for your mascot to effectively engage the audience, it should have a sense of life in it. It should feel like it’s alive, and not just another robotic and unfeeling entity whose only possible purpose is to bore the audience and cause them to be more detached from the brand. An example of a dynamic brand mascot that engages the audience well is SlideGenius’s very own SlideGuy. He’s hip, he’s suave, and he sure looks like he hangs out with cool people a lot. He’s the perfect face that communicates what kind of an A-okay presentation design company SlideGenius is.
