Reviving or Refreshing Your Mascot
Better Back in the Day?
There’s a number of reasons a mascot can fade away over time.
Want to bring back a dormant character or one that’s lost it’s luster? For one reason or another, a mascot can fade away over time but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad character. Changes in management, lack of willing performers, costume degradation, or updated company branding can factor into a character’s irrelevancy. Let’s look at how to bring them back to their glory days.
Lacking Performers
Perhaps the easiest obstacle to address in order to bring your character back to life.
A mascot needs a performer, but sometimes performers are hard to find. Maybe your go-to performer moved on or you can no longer find willing volunteers around the office to step into the oversized feet. Anyone can be a good performer so long as they are willing to do so. The first hurdle is finding someone willing to sweat a little. Check out our staffing advice page for ideas on how to recruit and train quality performers, see if we can help you find a performer, or if we can help train your inexperienced (but willing) performers.
Organizational Changes in Management and / or Focus.
The most likely reason a mascot falls dormant.
If this applies to you, dear reader, odds are you just experienced a change in management or organizational focus. Maybe you want to bring back a dormant mascot, or perhaps the last person in charge didn’t like or understand the value of a mascot. There are several angles in play to reintroduce your character to the class - so long as the costume is in good shape and still reflects your brand (see following sections).
You can always just start using the character again as if they didn’t disappear for an extended period of time, but let’s face it, that’s boring and you aren’t here for that solution. At least have some sort of comment prepared when you’re inevitably asked why they came back other than “we wanted to use them more.”
You can add to the character’s lore and create a story explaining why they had to go away for a while yet needed to come back and represent your brand. If you don’t have time to flesh out an entire story, find ways to reintroduce the character to your audience either through social media or events.
Costume Issues
Is your costume falling apart, needing repairs, or did someone leave it soaked with sweat in a bag for so long it became unusable?
Nobody wants to have a tattered mascot costume represent their brand. Even if you are forced to use a costume that isn’t in great shape, your public perception could take a hit with people associating your brand with a lack of care.
Depending on the severity of the problem, some repairs can be addressed by a local seamstress. However, if there’s structural damage (especially inside the head) or you need to patch faded parts of the costume, you’ll likely need to send it off to the original manufacturer for repairs. If you don’t know the original manufacturer, I can help you find one that specializes in repairs.
Our Brand No Longer Matches the Costume
Rebranding is a normal process for a business, and trying to update everything is a challenge. A mascot costume featuring outdated branding is easy to toss into storage to be forgotten over time. However, the investment into a mascot could be considered a deterrent to committing to a rebrand.
Your business needs to maintain consistent branding across all of it’s entities, including a mascot. You don’t want to have an identity crisis with different eras of branding in use at the same time. You don’t want to leave your mascot behind or let it be the reason why you don’t update your branding.
Companies should be wary of placing any branding onto parts of a costume that would require a complete replacement to update. For example, costumes shouldn’t have a brand embroidered directly onto it’s chest, rather have it attach to the chest or be featured on an article of clothing for easier updating.
If you originally turned a character in your logo into a mascot only to rebrand and drop that character, you run into some identity issues. Your existing customers will still recognize the character from the past, but now it’s harder for new customers to understand why the mascot is associated with your brand.
The same goes for having the costume colors match your brand’s unique colors. If you originally had a purple color palate for your logo therefore creating a purple mascot only to rebrand to a yellow color palate, you now have an out of place character. Yes, you can claim “brand loyalty” for wanting to keep the character the same, but you’ve lost that visual connection between your mascot and your brand.
Depending on how different your mascot has become compared to the new branding, you may need to consider getting a new costume made… or creating a new character.
Do you want to bring back an old crowd favorite character but time hasn’t been kind?
Consider the following
Want to talk about reviving or refreshing your mascot?
Connect with us and see how we can return to those glory days.