Make your brand sticky with a custom cartoon character

Have you ever wondered how to make your brand sticky?

Whether you want to market your business or your personal brand, it is important to give your audience easy ways to remember your brand. You might want to use a clever name, a strong slogan or even a singing jingle for radio adverts.

 

 

But I would like to suggest something different: cartoon characters, or mascots as some people call them.

Mascots are brilliant in many ways.For a start they are usually colorful and attractive, so they improve the design of your marketing material, whether you use them on your website, brochure, or business card. Then they add a personal touch that helps people connect with your brand. They also add a touch of humor, and I like to think that it's OK to use humor in your business life, as long as it remains professional and non-degrading. Finally, when designed carefully, mascots also help people understand what your brand is about.

Take the example of the Handy Marketer mascot. To me, this site is about providing practical tips about marketing and design, things that I learned on the field, by myself most times. I originally wanted to call it the DIY Marketer, but the URL was taken, so I stayed with The Handy Marketer instead. When I was thinking about my logo, I instantly thought about this little DIY girl. The character is a curly girl wearing drawing tools on her belt, because I really wanted to emphasize the DIY aspect. I guess I could have used a business shirt or something more professional to relate to Marketing, but I wanted to keep it relatively low key.

So how do you design your own mascot?

Let me share some tips with you:

1. Find your mascot's identity:

We could call that the brand essence, or brand identity. Who is your mascot? What values do you want to reflect? Are there some key traits that you want to highlight?

2. What style do you want for your character?

Start by doing an online search for inspiration. What brand mascots do you like out there? Look at sport teams, personalities, food brands, corporate brands, anything that you can find. Find what attracts you the most and see if you can identify a pattern between your favorite mascots.

• Will it be in human shape, an animal, or even an object?


• Do you want a vector character, a pencil sketch, a 3D rendering?


• Do you prefer thick black lines and strong colors, or no lines and more subtle color variations?


• Keep going until you can pinpoint how you would like your mascot to look.

3. Design your own mascot:

If you can draw, you might consider creating your character yourself. I designed my little mascot myself, did a sketch on paper, scanned it and drew it again in Illustrator. You can find a lot of tutorials on internet: here is a list of 12 tutorials.

4. Find a designer for your mascot:

If you have no creative flair and haven't touched a pencil since kindergarten, it's perfectly fine, just let professional designers help you. If you are already working with a design agency and they have some illustrators in their team, you can just ask them how much they would charge you for designing a custom character.

But of course you can find very talented designers on the net who will create amazing cartoons for you at very affordable costs.

• Freelance websites:
  Post your project on a freelancing website like Freelancer or Elance and let designers bid for your project. Select which designer you think has the most talent for your job (and matches your budget), award them your project and work with them to develop your character to specifications.


• Crowdsourcing:
  Use websites like DesignCrowd or 99Designs to post your project as a contest. Describe what you are looking for, set your price, and watch as dozens of designers come up with suggestions. You don't have to pick a designer at the beginning of the project: once you have posted your brief, you will be provided with dozens of suggestions and can choose from there which designer you prefer to work with.


• Cartoon Likeness:
  Kim Garst, a great social media advocate, offers a pretty good deal on her website for creating your own cartoon character.

5. More than one version?

Depending on where and how you will use your mascot, you might want to design a few variations of the character. For example, you might want to have the character read a book, shake someone's hand, jump, look surprised, etc..

So I'd be interested to know: what do you think of my mascot? Which brand do you actually remember using a mascot? Do you have one for yourself?