Success and Failure of Mascot marketing

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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.