How To Create A Mascot For Your Business

Pat Walls

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Updated: October 8th, 2022

What Is A Business Mascot?

A business mascot is a humanized character or an avatar designed to serve as a business ambassador. People, animals, objects, and fictional creatures can be used to build business mascots. Mascots can be used as part of the company logo or separately, and in various digital or offline marketing materials.

If deployed appropriately, the business mascots can be a great branding strategy. However, it is worth noting that business mascots do not work for all brands.

Mascot Key Takeaways

Business mascots can humanize your business and shorten the path to the client’s heart.
Mascots can give your brand a distinct personality
Using business mascots can make your marketing feel more attractive and engaging
Mascots attract attention and make your product stand out

How Do Business Mascots Work?

Business mascots lend the brand a distinct personality.

The primary purpose of a mascot is to build and strengthen brand identity.

Benefits of using brand mascots include:

Build an emotional connection with the audience
Establishing a distinct and recognizable personality
Inspire the audience to continue the conversation

Additionally, business mascots make a perfect tool to make your social media profiles stand out. Using mascots can also:

Differentiate your business from the competition
Help represent your brand
Help resonate your brand with your audience.

Real-World Business Mascots Use Cases

Here are some of the successful business mascot use cases to inspire you.

1. How KFC Built Business Mascot To Drive Brand Awareness

When Colonel, the KFCs founder died, the chain began to lose its way. Despite the efforts to revive the business, KFC fell into really bad unintended consequences.

Reinstating Colonel as the brand image, helped the brand to bounce back into the business. The powerful advertising campaign features the founder’s image and runs on different media including TV shows, online games, comics, and even on social media.

KFC's decision to make Colonel a mainstay of the brand's advertising was deliberate. The brand has come up with different Colonel variations, aimed at keeping the campaigns fresh and captivating.

To date, every KFC customer associates Colonels Mascot with the business. This shows that business mascots build brand awareness.

2. Johnnie Walker Mascot That Conveys the Brands Uniqueness Visually

When George Paterson and Alexander Walker launched Red Label and Black label, they felt it was suitable to come up with a brand mascot that would help the brand to stand out from the competition. The duo settled on the artwork by a cartoonist named Tom Browne.

The striding man was an illustration of an outdoorsman who also enjoyed a spot of shopping.

Johnnie Walker's striding man logo is perhaps one of the iconic examples of how brands use business mascots to create brand awareness and differentiation from the competition.

Being the only whisky brand with a striding man as a business mascot, the character made the alcoholic beverage highly recognizable among others and became the symbol of unique quality.

How to Create a Mascot for Your Brand

Choose the right character
- Take time to explore and choose character personality
Plan a Visual Content Strategy
Brainstorm the character poses, emotions, outfits, and scenes
Use online tools to design and customize the business mascot's look

Online Tools For Creating A Mascot Design

Here is a collection of freemium and paid tools for creating a business mascot design:

GraphicSprings: Enables you to design your own unique mascot with ease in just minutes.
BrandCrowd: Easy to use and allows you full customization to get the mascot logo you want!
DesignMantic: Free Mascot logo creator tool
LogoDesign: Create Free Mascot Logos Online