Brand mascots offer magical opportunities in audience engagement and brand traction; however, just like any introduction, your mascot’s first impressions matter. Launching a new brand mascot becomes a scary undertaking, with your brand’s expenses and your organisation’s future on the line. When you strategise thoroughly, breaking the launch process down into carefully choreographed stages, you maximise chances of success.
In some ways, a polarising launch reception can be just as profitable and productive as a strongly positive reception. Forgetability and inconsequentiality become worst-case scenarios. By incorporating the following launch structure, you can learn how to introduce your new brand mascot by avoiding obscurity and solidifying your mascot’s impact.
Brand Mascot Launch Strategy
The best strategies provide a correlated network of workshopped tactics, illustrated in a vibrant array of memorable media. The best way to schedule an effective introduction is to break it down into three sections: pre-launch, launch, and post-launch.
Pre-Launch
Pre-launch is the planning and momentum generation phase. Brand strategists often decide on the format of their mascot launch before or during the mascot costumes design phase, to make sure their design matches their tactics. Part of the strategy involves fully fleshing-out your mascot. The character, alongside a creative design, needs media in a variety of forms and poses, and a rich and exciting backstory to resonate with customers.
Whether you’re going for a high-budget launch event or a sneaky social media reveal, make sure your schedule has a regimented timeframe, and all of your assets come prepared in advance. This could include setting up mascot social media accounts, creating stylised print media, or preparing short film clips.
If you’re building momentum with hints and teasers, spread these out over time and increase the frequency and transparency until the launch arrives. Create clues and puzzles to drum up excitement and interaction. Using implicit or explicit quantities of social media interaction as a trigger for launch ensures that the new brand mascot introduction occurs at the right time. Either create a post that promises to introduce the mascot at a certain threshold of interactions, or just quietly monitor mentions until the threshold arrives.
Brand Mascot Launch
The classic brand mascot launch might coincide with a national celebration or company-wide event, a high-energy, high-turnout extravaganza. 2020 makes such events a bit trickier. However, the new focus on online presence presents opportunities in building social media hype for an impressive e-launch.
New mascots innately create interest, as do new products. Pairing a newly branded product or design with a new brand mascot can create a feedback loop of interest between the two innovations, allowing each update to benefit the other, and your brand.
Launches should include multiple prongs of visible brand integration. When a mascot gets introduced, it should be visually linked to your logo, your website and a variety of social media platforms. Consider promotional offers or VIP customer opportunities with the new mascot character.
Think outside the box with launch materials. They could include blog posts, interviews, gifs, or videos.
If the mascot has a social media presence unto itself, consider interacting with other similar accounts or engaging in whichever trend or challenge is doing the biggest numbers upon release. Whether this involves jumping on a hashtag or creating your own, the brand mascot launch possibilities are endless.
Post-Launch
To ensure the new character is sustainable and worthwhile, keep the updates and appearances regular and frequent. Give your mascot a personality, and let the audience get to know it as it develops over time. Interactions and relationship-building could take the form of QnAs, polls or comment drives.
Feedback on the launch also becomes hugely important. As well as scanning the online responses, it may be worth incentivising surveys to assess reception fully. Adjustments and adaptations add an edge to your mascots freshness. Sustained posts and appearances create a consistent and hard-hitting mascot introduction with a lasting impression.
This persistence helps to achieve the new brand mascot’s objective: creating a productive relationship between brand and audience.
