1.    Why do I need a character? 

A well-designed character can become your strategy to stand out from the competition and improve the effectiveness of your sales and marketing efforts. If you want your brand’s name to be easily remembered – create a character. It will give your target audience a tool to memorize your company name and what your product/ service is about! What is even more important, a character will help you to build and develop a closer relationship with your target audience. 

You may think that characters are reserved for children’s brand only. It's not always the case. More and more adult’s brands choose the character to differentiate themselves. Think about insurance companies: Geico’s Gecko or Aflac’s Duck. Also, more and more B2B companies choose characters as a branding strategy – Mailchimp’s Monkey or Trello’s Taco just to name a few. It doesn’t matter whenever it’s a video, website, product packaging or social media campaign - a character with a recognizable personality will engage even adults. 

2.    How does a character add value to my brand?

As we mentioned above, a well-designed character can improve the effectiveness of your sales and marketing efforts. That being said, a character can help you to increase your sales, if used in a right way. Remember to keep your target audience in mind when choosing the right character/s and what message it/they are going to send to your audience. 

In today’s digital world, a great character can become your brand spokesperson on social media. It can connect with your customers without making them feel that you are actually selling them something, and making your brand even more recognizable. For example, check Captain Morgan accounts on social media or M&M’s. Those are big brands, but you can easily incorporate a character into small business branding. Check for example Duct Dudes and Fontenot’s.

As stated in this article, characters are more effective than celebrities. Synthesio monitored social media buzz generated by both celebrity spokespeople and brand mascots (a character) and found that brand mascots, on average, contributed to a much higher percentage of that brand’s buzz on social media. While most celebrity endorsers only contributed to 3.19% or less of a brand’s buzz (with the exception of GoDaddy’s Danica Patrick), mascot endorsers ranked much higher. The Pillsbury Doughboy contributed to 22.14% of their brand buzz, the Aflac Duck scored 11.82%, Flo from Progressive captured 6.85%, and the GEICO Gecko generated 6.15%.

In addition to creating more buzz, brand mascots contribute to higher rates of Facebook shares. Another study found that for most brands, using a brand mascot boosts shareability significantly when compared to non-character visual content. For example, the Charmin Bears contributed to 585% more shares, Tony the Tiger led to 279% more shares, the Keebler Elves led to 203% more shares, and Mr. Clean led to 182% more shares. More about you can read here. 

3.    How do I choose a brand character? 

To start with, you should know the answers for the following questions:

• What do you want your audience to see or feel when they connect with your brand?

• If your brand were a car/magazine/public personality/music genre, what would it be?

• What colors, textures and visual components do you connect strongly with when you think of your brand?

• What is your brand’s sweet spot?

• What are some of the words that come to mind when people think/ see your brand?

You can continue to read about other aspects here. 

Remember that whether you are a traditional, casual, edgy, or other type of brand, your character need to look professional, be simple, and the most importantly, it must be original. Don’t use the clip art or clip a-like- art as people has already seen it and that’s not a message that you want to send to your target audience. You want to send a positive image of your business and level of service that you deliver. Every detail matters so your character need to go with right typography, website coloristic and visualization etc. 

4.    What type of characters do you design? 

We specialize in 2D vector characters - color or b&w. Characters can be flat or have light, shadow, and outlines. 

5.    Do you use Artificial Intelligence applications when designing a character?

No.  We do use photo reference for accuracy.  Everything is sketched by hand and manually digitized.