Where have all the mascots gone?

It’s no secret that the characterful brand mascot has become a dying breed in 2024. At this year’s Super Bowl – essentially the World Cup for ad campaigns – mascot-led commercials were almost non-existent. And those that did appear – the M&Ms characters and the Geico Gecko – were old faces, first created in 1954 and 1999 respectively. In fact, one of the most attention-grabbing brand redesigns in recent months, by the UK car company Jaguar, saw the brand ditch its famous leaping cat altogether in favour of a simple modernist text graphic.

Those days when the marketplace was flooded with the surreal escapades of Tango’s Orange Man, the hypnotic grooves of Levi’s Flat Eric, and the sporting prowess of the Honey Monster are over. Why have we killed off the critters, and is their near-extinction good for business?

“They do seem like a relic from a different era,” says Hugo Timm, creative director at Frontify. When mascots are still in use, he’s noticed them becoming increasingly basic. “You need to sell soap, just put arms and legs on it,” says Hugo. But he’s also of the opinion that there’s some snobbishness at play. “There’s an infantilising effect, and that contributes to mascots not being considered a sophisticated brand asset. Instead, we’re seeing more insignias, motifs and secondary brand assets.”

There does seem to be a growing desire for abstraction, as brands gravitate back towards definitive logos that can be instantly recognised across a wide range of digital and physical contexts. Now that we spend an increasing amount of time staring at our phones, a brand identity that can be communicated through the tiny square of an app icon is more vital than ever. Google’s iconic logo becomes a multicoloured G and Strava’s becomes a geometric A and V. Microsoft is now mostly identified by four simple coloured squares.

“We don’t encounter many clients who ask us to design mascots anymore,” says Phil Zumbruch, who runs the Berlin design studio Studio Lob with co-founder Jannis Zell. “More often, it’s something we suggest when we bring our ideas to the table. That said, when we do, we get great feedback and people seem to really relate to it.”

When Phil and Jannis were asked to create a brand identity for Nonna’s Pizza, a Neapolitan restaurant on the Azores island of São Miguel, they decided to go down the character route. They’d noticed a growing trend of restaurant brands creating static, one-dimensional mascots that were just a walking and grinning piece of food. To lean into the idea of “Grandmother’s cooking” – which was a core element of the restaurant’s identity – they created Nonna: an elderly little tomato, with no arms and no legs, just a few wrinkles and some missing dentures. She smiles warmly, but also has a few pained grimaces in her emotional wheelhouse. “We thought it would be cool to do a tomato that is super old and not so desperate to please,” says Phil.

“Mascots are a fantastic tool for helping brands connect naturally with their audience, and they can really stick with people over the years,” says Nora Muñoz, the co-founder of Cherry Bomb, a creative studio based in Mexico City. “But they need a bold personality, a great story, and plenty of attitude. Without a clear brand foundation or defined tone of voice, mascots can become meaningless distractions in the brand’s communication.”

But creating bold personalities is a risky business that can often backfire. Take, for example, Compare the Market: a UK price comparison website that has been successfully communicating its brand identity through the ever-developing life story of the aristocratic meerkat, Aleksandr Orlov. When they released his ‘autobiography’ in 2010 – titled A Simples Life: The Life and Times of Aleksandr Orlov – it outsold Tony Blair’s memoirs on pre-orders. But the recent addition of a new character, Carl the Wombat, has provoked an irrational outpouring of hatred at how terribly annoying he is. Threads now frequently appear on Reddit with titles like “Can anybody else not stand this bloody wombat?”, “Realising that Carl the Wombat isn’t going away any time soon” and “I hate that f*cking wombat”.

The question of whether irritation is such a terrible thing when it comes to brand memorability is an interesting one. Microsoft has toyed with numerous mascots over the years, but ask anyone to name one and they will most likely say Clippy (real name: Clippit), the sentient paperclip with leering eyes that was released with Windows 95. Clippy became a hate figure for users and was eventually killed off in 2007, but has since built up an affectionate cult following and become something of a meme on TikTok. “I think some kind of weirdness is good; a mascot shouldn't be too straight or cute,” says Phil.

The 2024 Olympics mascot certainly proved his point. Phryge (apparently pronounced freej) was meant to be modelled on the Phrygian hat, a symbol of the French Revolution, but instead looked like a red mess with legs – it became a viral hit thanks to its incomprehensible and unpronounceable adorableness. “Mascots come from a tradition of advertising that can’t be rationalised in the same way as brand principles,” says Hugo. “I don’t think they should be precision engineered to convey specific blends of corporate values. It’s an exercise in creating charisma – which isn’t easy… All my favourites are the most absurd; like Dollynho [a green humanoid bottle of Dolly soda that became famous for its poor rendering and unintentional humour], so terrifyingly bad that it became loved in Brazil.”

Vicky Bullen, CEO of the global branding agency Coley Porter Bell, thinks brands are now less inclined to put the work in to create a mascot that sticks. “Mascots take investment to invent, maintain, and keep relevant to people’s lives. Perhaps brands are less willing to take the long view required?” she says. But for those that do, she adds, the benefits can be enormous: “Look at how the Michelin Man has stood the test of time, and become a visual icon.” Bibendum, as he’s officially known, has certainly evolved. Designed as, essentially, a pile of tyres with arms and legs, he arrived on the scene in 1894 (making him one of the oldest mascots still in use) as a wine-swilling, chain-smoking old curmudgeon who wore a monocle. Today, he’s given up the booze and cigs, runs around a lot, and has adopted a dog.

One of the most successful recent examples of how a mascot can develop and expand across numerous mediums is Duo the owl, avian star of the language learning app Duolingo. When the app launched in 2011, Duo was nothing more than a static graphic icon. By 2017, he had become a defining part of the app experience, a cheery, motivational little fella that greeted users and cheered on their successes. But the owl’s inclination to incessantly message users to remind them to do their daily lessons created a kind of unintended user-generated personality trait: demented. Memes went viral online of the owl in classic horror movie scenes, stalking his users, and the brand soon decided to get in on the action.

“One reason why Duo the owl has been so successful is because of the comical contrast between Duo’s in-app personality as a helpful coach who is persistent but encouraging, compared to his social media personality that is completely unhinged. We call Duo’s personality ‘wholesome unhinged’,” says Greg Hartman, executive creative director at Duolingo.

“It started out very simply with taking a Duo owl mascot suit that we had created mainly for recruiting events and using the mascot suit in a few TikTok trend videos,” says Zaria Parvez, the senior social media manager who played a big role in Duo’s recent character development. “But we didn’t go into this with a fully formed TikTok strategy. What we did is hire junior talent who really understood the platform and empowered them to experiment and try new things without too many layers of bureaucracy and approvals. Over time we’ve developed more of Duo’s personality and lore, like his obsession with the pop star Dua Lipa, or his rivalry with Google Translate.” Duo the owl now has 13.7 million followers on TikTok, which – at the time of writing – is only a little less than Johnny Depp.

It seems that in an increasingly polarised and risk-averse cultural marketplace, brands are far more likely to play it safe and fit in, than pour serious time, energy and money into developing a loveable creature with a complex. “But if you are willing to be radical with its usage,” says Jannis, “and really give it a chance to grow, then a mascot can still become this eruptive part of a brand identity, sometimes even by accident.”