How to Create Mascot Designs to Enhance your Brand Identity

When creating a product or promoting advocacy as a nonprofit, we strive to make it human-centered. Creating a good mascot is one way to connect to your intended audience. However, designing a successful mascot is easier said than done. It requires careful consideration of your core values, target audience, and overall marketing strategy. 

Let’s explore some tips and techniques for creating mascot designs to represent your business or organization. Whether starting from scratch or enhancing an existing mascot, this guide will provide helpful insights to help you create a mighty mascot. 

Table of Contents

• What is a mascot? 
• What is a brand mascot strategy?
• Tips for Creating an Effective Mascot Design
  • Understand the competition
  • Define Your Brand Values
  • Consider Your Target Audience
  • Choose the Right Style and Colors
  • Make your Design Stand Out 
  • Test and Refine
• Let Us Design Your Mascot Logo!

What is a mascot? 

A mascot can be an effective way to enhance your brand identity and create a memorable connection with your audience. Mascots can range from personified animals and inanimate objects to amplified human caricatures.

What is a brand mascot strategy?

A brand mascot strategy is a marketing approach that involves creating and utilizing a fictional character, often an anthropomorphic animal, as a representative symbol for a brand or product. This character serves as the face of the brand, embodying its values, personality, and identity. The mascot is designed to establish an emotional connection with consumers, enhance brand recognition, and differentiate the brand from competitors.

Your mascot can appear in various marketing materials such as advertisements, packaging, websites, social media profiles, and promotional campaigns. A well-executed mascot strategy increases brand visibility and recall with the mascot serving as a mnemonic device.

Importance of A Mascot for A Business

1. Enhanced Brand Recognition

Sometimes, a logo isn’t enough. You will need an extra boost of branding recognition from a specific character who will become the face of the brand. A mascot can help your brand become more well-known to its target audience.

2. Build a Connection

A mascot can help establish a connection with the target audience. For example, a mascot can represent the brand’s pain points. From there, the brand could promote the business to swoop in to solve that mascot’s problem. 

3. Personify a Brand

Having a mascot makes your brand feel “human.” This will engage your audiences with your brand and know more about the business. Plus, the mascot will give people a sense of how the brand would be when they interact with it, whether online or physically.

4. Tell a Brand Story

Mascots can be great storytellers. They can provide context for the brand’s history, tell a story when they come to life as they engage with the target audience, and strengthen the emotional connection between the brand and the audience.

Tips for Creating an Effective Mascot Design

Check out these tips and insights to help you create an effective mascot design.

Understand the competition

Before you get started, understand what your competitors are doing. For example, if you need to design a mascot for a university, look at other schools within your region or country. Then, check out what mascots they use. On the other hand, if you’re designing for e-sports, look at other teams or gamers. More importantly, analyze the competition in your field to find how you can separate yourself from the competition. 

Define Your Brand Values

It is also important to define your brand values and personality. Your mascot should align with these values and convey them in a fun and engaging way. Your brand values are the core beliefs and principles that guide your brand’s identity, purpose, and mission. These values represent what your brand stands for and what it aims to achieve.

For example, if your brand values creativity and innovation, you might design a mascot that is playful and imaginative. Alternatively, if your brand values professionalism and trustworthiness, you might design a mascot that is authoritative and dependable. Likewise, your mascot should embody the personality and values of your brand, creating a memorable and engaging brand experience.

Consider Your Target Audience

Your mascot should appeal to your target audience and resonate with their interests and preferences. Consider the age, gender, and interests of your target audience when designing your mascot. For example, if your target audience is children, you might design a colorful and playful mascot that is easy to remember and appeals to their sense of fun. If your target audience is adults, you might design one that is more professional and sophisticated. 

By considering this insight, you can create mascot designs that resonate with the audience. It would also create an emotional connection between your brand and your audience. This can lead to increased engagement, brand loyalty, and sales. Ultimately, a mascot that effectively appeals to your target audience can help to create a memorable and impactful brand experience.

Choose the Right Style and Colors

The style of your 2d or 3d mascot should align with your brand and target audience. Choose a style that is consistent with your brand identity, and that will resonate with your audience. You may want to find an animal or character that will appeal to your customers, audience, and location. Plus, that character needs to fit the personality you’ve selected for your mascot naturally. If you want a fierce mascot, consider a tiger, or wolf character. If you want something extraordinary, consider using a giraffe, pig, or elephant as your mascot. Or, you may want something more cute or safe if you have a younger target audience.

It is best to note that colors must be relevant. Color can be a powerful tool in creating a memorable mascot design. Choose colors that align with your brand, and that will stand out and be easily recognizable. In addition, your mascot should be easy to recognize and remember. Avoid complex designs and go for a simple design that can be easily associated with your brand.

It’s at this point you might start Googling animal mascot creators, but most free online tools will just spit out a generic logo image. While you might get lucky, it’s unlikely you’ll walk away with the design you envisioned.

Make your Design Stand Out 

Mascots must be bold and eye-catching. Making your mascot design stand out is important to ensure that it captures the attention of your audience and leaves a lasting impression. Here are some tips to make your mascot pop out:

• Try a limited color palette and use dark outlines to make your character stand out. 
• Use simple shapes to convey the personality of the brand or team 
• Mascot logos must be legible, simplified, and unique.
• Include the entire team or business name within the logo.
• Research how to make a mascot logo in Photoshop

Test and Refine

Once you have created your mascot, test it with your audience and gather feedback. Testing and refining your mascot design is an important step in the design process to ensure that your mascot resonates with your target audience and effectively represents your brand identity. Here are some tips for testing and refining your mascot design:

• Conduct Audience Research: Before finalizing your mascot design, it’s important to conduct audience research to gather feedback and insights from your target audience. This can help you identify what aspects of your mascot design work well and what areas need improvement.
• Get Feedback from Peers and Experts: In addition to gathering feedback from your target audience, it’s also helpful to get feedback from peers and experts in the design industry. This can provide you with valuable insights and perspectives that can help you refine your design and make it more effective.
• Test in Different Formats and Contexts: To ensure your mascot design works well in different formats and contexts, it’s important to test it in various situations. This might include testing it in print and digital formats, testing it in different sizes and resolutions, and testing it in different marketing materials and campaigns.
• Refine and Iterate: Based on feedback and testing results, refine and iterate your mascot design until you achieve the desired result. This might involve making adjustments to the design elements, such as color, shape, and typography, or it might involve refining the overall concept and messaging.

Mascot Types and Elements

There are three main mascot types in branding:

• Human
• Animal
• Object

Here are the common attributes of any good mascot:

1. A Unique Face

Since mascots are the personified version of your brand, a mascot NEEDS to have a face. But it’s not just ANY face, but one that stands out from the competition. For instance, many brands use animals as their mascots. Birds, for example, are common mascot types. However, you can create a unique mascot appearance for your brand if the bird has ears or spots. This way, your mascot won’t get mistaken by the other well-known bird mascots.

2. Branding Colors

Your brand colors should be visible on your mascot. If you’re introducing the mascot for the first time along with the brand, it will help your audience know that you’re using a specific color palette. From there, your audience will recognize your brand and mascot even without the presence of a logo or your brand name. 

3. Costume

Although not required for some mascots, having a costume will add another layer of uniqueness to your mascot design. Most brands would go for a shirt as the mascot’s only apparel. However, you can mix up styles. For example, you can add a scarf or bandana to make the mascot fashionable. If possible, add the brand name to the costume. This will help your audience know which brand the mascot is associated with!

Let Us Design Your Mascot Logo!

When you have a mascot, you might want a logo that includes their image. For some brands, the mascot is seen only in the logo. Other brands may want the mascot to be a physical character present at events or an animated personality that talks in commercials. In any case, you need a professional and dependable designer to handle the job and make the revisions you need.

Our design team at Penji is trained and ready to create a custom mascot design that speaks to your unique style – plus any other designs you need for your business. 

Ready to find out how it works? Watch a demo here.