Research - Softening Power: Cuteness as Organizational Communication Strategy in Japan and the West

Iain MACPHERSONMacEwan University, Faculty of Fine Arts and Communication, Assistant Professor
Teri Jane BRYANTHaskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, Associate Professor Emerita

cute as being a organisational communication - visual or verbal

This paper describes the use of cute communications (visual or verbal, and in various media) as an organizational communication strategy prevalent in Japan and emerging in western countries. 

This is most commonly or obviously the case with corporate branding, such as mascots marketing a company or character goods produced by it, or the kawaii attributes of actor spokespeople, advertising jingles, and logo font, along with other design elements.

The strategic intent of such communications may be to persuade stakeholders to adopt a specific behaviour, such as buying, voting, or recycling; to inculcate a more generally favourable impression; or even to improve information intake (Nittono, Fukushima, Yano & Moriya, 2012).

Organizations want to endear themselves to stakeholders; to make their message content simpler and engaging; and in the case of impersonal or authority-wielding institutions, to soften their image.

We should be aware of how centres of authority (state agencies, educators, large companies, etc.) attempt to associate themselves with smiling babies, innocent children, talking animals, pretty colours ... funny creatures and akarui (cheerful things). If those in positions of power can convince those below them that they are in fact not intimidating, the task of persuading, influencing and controlling them becomes easier. (2000a, p. 150)

Cute Communications in the West – Past and Present Practice and Research - 46

Konrad Lorenz’s 1940s Kindenschema findings (e.g., 1943). He and following ʻcute-ologists’(?)4 explore a basic human response to physical features found in babies – roundness, fragility and clumsiness, big heads and eyes, short limbs, etc. – but also in similarly aligned adults, animals, cartoons, and even machines or other objects. Such cuteness often signals or suggests a range of personality traits, such as vulnerability, playfulness, affection, curiosity, innocence, and naiveté (or ignorance and inferiority). In Lorenz’s terms, perceived cuteness “releases” protective and adoring reactions in people.

cuteness in all its cultural and national flavours is increasingly drawing attention

Unlike scholars and journalists, advertisers and other communications practitioners never really forgot the ʻsoftening power’ of cute in western culture, and they are now turning it to ever more, and more effective, uses (Vranica, 2012).

Many of today’s most iconic personified trademarks, such as Tony the Tiger and the Michelin Man, range between fifty and a hundred years in age or more (Callcott & Lee, 1995). And western corporations have not been the only organizations to thereby soften up their stakeholders. Disney’s critters very effectively emitted a range of U.S. wartime communications, from propaganda to military training videos. 

Wall Street Journal’s advertising editor, Suzanne Vranica (2012), attributes today’s trend in mascot messaging to the communicative affordances and constraints of social media. The platform’s normative informality means ʻsoft sells’ become imperative, while its interactivity animates avatars with compelling ʻvirtual personality’ as they engage in cheerful dialogue with loyal or angry fans.

Its emerging or ensconced ubiquity is pointed to by a panoply of markers: the normalization of pink colours in menswear (Baker, 2012); kawaii simultaneously establishing mainstream and underground cachet (Kretowick, 2014); a ʻbrony’ fan culture of men from all walks of life who adore the ʻMy Little Pony’ cartoon (Wigler, 2014); the cupcake craze (Emery, 2014); children’s movies with in-jokes for parents (McKay, 2011); adults who read children’s books (Graham, 2014); the fact that an emoji-only social site has been launched (Kingston, 2014); an ever-expanding number of cute little cars (Patton, 2008); and perhaps above all, the internet’s infinitude of kittens, lolcats, and babies.

What McVeigh (2000b) pointed out of Hello Kitty’s reign in Japan now holds true for kitsch in the west: it appeals to females as ʻcute’ when they are girls, as ʻcool’ when they are adolescent, and then as ʻcamp’ to women. As for men, most western metrosexuals don’t embrace cuteness per se, but they are modeling a masculinity that is consanguine with cuteness in its ʻpost-machismo’ (Ibsen, 2013).