Stephen Brown, Sharon Ponsonby-McCabe
Routledge, 27 Jun 2014
The Honey Monster, the Milky Bar Kid, Captain Birdseye, Bertie Basset, the Tango Man and Tetley's tannin-addled tea folks all had their supporters. The runaway winners with 20 per cent of the total vote, were the PG Tips Chimps, spokes-simians for Britains premier brand of tea. The nattering troupe made their first television appearance in 1956.
Cadburys drumming gorilla boosted the sales of Dairy Milk by 9 per cent or so. It also did much to restore the reputation of Cadburys which had been hit by contamination incidents and food hygiene scared at the firms venerable factory in Bournville.
Cohen(2014) claims that a seven - category continuum of brand embodiment, ranging from cartoon characters and costumed actors to depersonalised people and fictitious human figureheads, can be readily identified beneath the mascot morass.
According to Miles(2014), the popularity of Orlov's progress is attributable to the societal contradictions that the campaign raises and assuages. In accordance with Holt's (2004) principles of cultural branding, he contends that the simmering issue of rising immigration, especially from Eastern European members of the ever-growing EU, is addressed and alleviated by the mocked and mocking meerkat.
Aleksandr's iconicity, however, can't be divorced from Britains class-conscious tradition of comic characters-cum-grotesques, as well as its legacy of much-loved brand mascots (carter 2012). The meerkats virtuoso use of social media and the new communication channels opened up by Web 2.0 are equally integral to its cultural ascendency. As Callcott and Lee (1995) recount, the rise and demise of iconic brand mascots owes much to the emergence and diffusion of new media, whether it be newspapers in the Gilded age, radio and film in the 1920s and the 1930s, commercial television in the early-post war era, or the digital technologies of today.
Technological change, clearly, is crucial to brand mascot's advance and retreat. Nostalgia is an important factor too (Warner 2007). Aleksandr Orlov and his merry menagerie of copycat critters is more than a contrarian embodiment of cut-price insurance cover. He's an incarnation-reincarnation, rather - of previous generations of brand animals.
Just as old soldiers never die, brand mascots live forever in the forests, fields and fjords of consumer memory, pining for the days when they were king of the marketing jungle. Just as Orlov is today, just as Churchill the bulldog once was, just as the honey monster once was, just as the energiser bunny once was, just as spuds Mackenzie once was, just as the Budweiser frogs once were.
Pictoplasma, a touring exhibition devoted to newly invented brand mascots, likewise features a Michelin man clone called 'the missing link'. They adore the incontrovertible fact that mascots are 'the gift that keeps on giving. They never get into trouble with the law. They don't up their fees. You can use them for a long, long time'(Schultz 2012). Edicts are issued about what a brand mascot can or can't do, or be seen doing, and policed with zero - tolerance intensity (Shalit 2000). The Pillsbury Doughboy, for instance, is a helper, a teacher, a friend; he would never do anything mischievous or engage in activities that are improper.
That said, there's more to mascots' popularity than consumer nostalgia and managerial adoration. There's a deeper driving force; humankind's anthropomorphic urge. We interpret the world in human terms and have done so since the dawn of time (Guthrie 1993). Today's pirated blockbuster movies like cars, Madagascar and ice age, with their sequels and spin-offs and ancillaries and appetising Happy meal deals, the imputation of human characteristics to the animal, vegetable and mineral things that surround us is ever-present and ineradicable (Neal 1985). Granted, there had been much academic debate on the causes and characteristics of anthropomorphism (Avis et al 2012).
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