Success and Failure of Mascot marketing

Some of you are using or at least thinking about using mascots to represent your business. They represent a face of your business and thus very important for designers to come up with lovable character. Today I was reading The best and worst Olympic mascots from the MSNBC articles. There seems to be some patterns for successful and unsuccessful design.

Who is the audience?

Unlike a local business, Olympic is a huge game that involves people from all over the world. Audiences varies in income, age, and race. So who is our audience? People who love to watch sports and performances? That too, but it’s also a social activity to watch the Olympic and discuss about it together as a family or friends in most  countries. So you can say that the audience is very broad.

What do people like in general?

There are some ‘general’ factors that are favored by majority of people regardless of the race, gender, age, etc. One factor is the color of object. Most people seems to have ‘positive’ attitude for the color of blue. Maybe it’s no surprising that people like the color of sky or the sea in general. Second factor is the shape of object. Round shapes are considered to be ‘cute’ especially for females. Examples of successful mascots using this simple factors are shown below.

Note that they also use different colors to symbolize variety of people.

Does that mean you can just draw any kinds of round and blue colored mascot to market successfully? Not really. Just see below and you will understand what I’m talking about.

What countries wants to emphasize

It’s no surprising that most countries want to emphasize something through its mascot, symbol of the country. Desire to use the symbol of country is very apparent in 2008’s Beijing Olympic mascosts below.

But if you emphasize your culture in wrong way, you can fail. For example, the mascot below is supposed to represent the ancient doll of Athens. No offense there, but it’s not even a good imitation.

As you can see, you have to be very careful when you want to represent the whole culture of your country in one single mascot design.

How to add ‘extra’ values for your product

When customers seek product locally or online, they are always looking for the ‘extra’ value from the product they purchase. That can include sex appeal, joyful experience, self satisfaction. So how can you add extra values for your product?

Cheap product? or Joyful experience?

I am about to go to the local farm to pick up some blueberries today. This so called “U-Pick” service let you pick up as many blueberries as you want and purchase them at lower cost than market value. My personal reason to go there to pick up blueberries is to eat blueberries, because I really like them. There is no doubt that this is the ‘main’ reason for many people to do this. So what’s extra values included in this service? For some customers, it’s the ‘cheap’ price that they pay to eat blueberries. If you are an accountant or economist, you know that it’s not really cheap. The time you spent picking up blueberries can be actually used to work extra hours for your job and earn more money to just buy bucket full of blueberries. So for those custumers,  it’s the social experience you enjoy with your friends or families (unless you come alone). Notice that for either custumers, you are providing at least one kind of extra value from this service.

Wider demography

As you can conclude from the above, you can target different kinds of customers at same time if you provide extra values for your customers. Those extra values does not always have to be monetory. Yes, you can provide coupons and discounts, but you can create similar effect just by providing customers extra joyful experience.

Extra values

So how can you add extra values for your product? Well, if you are in food industry, you can provide convenience and time saving benefits like Deli and pizza delivery. If you run web service, you can provide chatting assistance to provide ’safety’ benefits. Or if you sell product online, you can set up forum for users to help each other on issues with product they purchased from you.

Learn from others

As I always say, you should study the business model of successful businesses in your industry and figure out the secrets that attract customers.

Simple steps to feed Twitter your blog posts

You can increase the size of your network efficiently if you connect Twitter and your blog posts. If you do not know anything about Twitter yet, read the following summary from Wikipedia article.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates (otherwise known as tweets) which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Feeding Twitter

So you are wondering what I’m talking about when I say you can post your blog on Twitter like RSS. Yeah, you can only send 140 characters, so how can you post your long blog article? Well, not by posting your whole blog straight, but by posting title + description + link like the following.

You can just post article on your blog and the feeder will automatically updates it on your twitter. So let’s see how you can do this.

1. Get Twitter account, if you do not have one yet.

2. You will need to activate RSS feature for your blog. If you haven’t done so already, get an account from FeedBurner and configure it for your blog.

3. Get an OpenID. You can use your WordPress OpenID as well (not your blog account, your official WordPress account which you can obtain from their website.

4. Log in to TwitterFeed using the OpenID you created above.

5. Add your FeedBurner URL on TwitterFeed as directed.

6. DONE! Check your Twitter after an hour or so (depending on how frequently you want feeder to receive your blog post data).

Visual marketing based on your content

When you create your website, what kind of design do you have in your mind? Full of pictures and movies to entertain visitors, or pages of texts that simply provide information to audiences? Well, it all depends on the kind of content you provide for your audiences.

It’s your content, not the industry

Just because you have started some game/movie review website, it does not mean that the website should be really creative and visual. Sure, you may want to use a movie to show the visual side of the game or movie, but audience might come for the information. For example, readers might want some ‘advice’ for whether they should play/watch the game/movie. Yes, audiences still want some convincing advice for purchase even after they see some tailors of the product elsewhere. So just because you belong to visually entertaining industry does not mean you should use rich contents.

It’s not all about your artistic skill

It’s usually the case that website of real artists are full of visuals and images. It’s totally appropriate and even attractive if your main content is to provide images like artists. But if you are just borrowing images from other sources to just make it look gorgeous, do it on your Myspace profile page. Especially if your content is based on information, audiences do not care about your fancy web design.

Art or Professionalism?

I just said that you should not be overly creative for your website design if your primary content is information, but there is differences between art and professionalism. As you can see, this blog is full of images especially on top of the website, but those images never interrupt the text content you are reading right now. If you design ‘around’ your content, it can be perceives as professional rather than ’showy’.

Learn what others do

If you are unsure of how to build design for your website, then simply look around. You can study the design from others who provide same content, and better be in same industry. You may not feel ‘original’ about mimicing other’s design, but that’s where every success business start from.

A way to learn blogging

If you currently own a blog, you must be desperate for increasing the traffic. Some of you expect the traffic to naturally increase as soon as you start your blog. You probably figured out that it was not easy like that. But don’t worry, it usually takes time. Some blogs become famous within 3 month, but others take 6+ months to reach 1000 access per day.

Learn from ‘Experts’

So one easy way to learn blogging tips including marketing knowledge is to learn from blogging experts. My favorite website to see those bloggers is the blogging section of Alltop started by Guy Kawasaki. Interestingly, those blogs are famous for providing blog tips, so it’s blogs for bloggers.

My favorites are PROBLOGGER and Business Blogs.

Make sure to read through their previous posts as well. You might think that old marketing tips are useless, but the same principle applies to today and it is unlikely that they will re-post same contents again just to let you know they wrote great tips before.

Power of Twitter

Blogs listed at Alltop are selected based mainly on Twitter responses, according to Alltop. That tells you something really important about marketing. Your ‘post’ can be famous by digg votes for few days, but your fame will not necessary last long. But when your ‘blog’ became famous among web community, particulary Twitter, you can be famous for long time for they can follow what you do.

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