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The inner Doughboy | page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Lately, however, a shadow has been darkening this magical, rainbow-filled cloudland. Some onlookers are muttering that the guardians of the brand icons have become so enraptured by these happy little beings that they've lost their grip on reality. "There are whole documents on what these characters will and won't do," complains Court Crandall, creative director at Ground Zero, a Santa Monica, Calif., advertising agency. "The documents go into the thousands of pages ... Meanwhile, no one ever stops to consider whether the character even feels worth a damn in the first place. There's a fine line between being a good brand custodian and being certifiably insane." It's a bit of a puzzle how these frothy little toons came to acquire such ponderous personalities. According to Margaret F. Callcott and Patricia A. Alvey, authors of "Toons Sell, and Sometimes They Don't: An Advertising Spokescharacter Typology and Exploratory Study," advertising spokescharacters made their debut during the first years of the 20th century, as a way of bringing scary large companies down to human scale. In "a period of migration, uprootedness, role changes and separations," Callcott and Alvey write, these tiny, gesturing creatures served as a reassuring presence, "a comforting substitute for the familiar face of local merchants." Far from being endowed with Flaubertian complexity, these proto-spokescritters simply served as literal embodiments of the product's "unique selling proposition." The umbrella-toting Morton Salt Girl, for instance, reinforced the message that the salt wouldn't become sticky in humidity. ("When it rains, it pours.") Nowadays, of course, the decision to invest in a fictitious spokescharacter is a much weightier proposition. As Kevin Keller, professor of marketing at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Management, points out, many companies have good reason to eschew a celebrity spokesperson in favor of a corporate-minted creation. "Companies are turning to fictitious spokespeople because the real ones are getting thrown in jail," Keller told me. "Even good people, people who really want to help the brand out, may end up doing things that harm the franchise." So, whereas actors Cybill Shephard and James Garner lost a tad of credibility as spokespeople for the Beef Industry Council when she admitted to being a vegetarian and he underwent heart-bypass surgery, no one could ever call into question the Pillsbury Doughboy's unimpeachable "expertise hook." "After all," Callcott and Alvey write, "who is better qualified to judge baking dough than a piece of dough himself?" No argument there. The attraction of spokescharacters, says Dartmouth's Keller, is that "I can craft their look, their words, their actions. And I can make sure, from a brand-building perspective, that with every move they make, they're adding value to the brand franchise." But somewhere along the line, as icon management became a legitimate professional specialty, this Henry Higgins-like impulse spun out of control. The operating principle went from benign anthropomorphism to a delusional break with reality. "We talk about our characters as if they are real people," says Ashley Postlewaite of Renegade Animation, an animation shop that specializes in personified animals operating in cartoon and live-action worlds. "We'll ask questions like 'Should Chester do this or that?' or 'What's the pig going to be wearing?' And it's as if we're sitting around a table saying, 'Oh, Meryl Streep isn't going to do that scene, she isn't going to do nudity.' It's that level of seriousness. Sometimes I think: I went to Stanford to have this conversation about how the pig wouldn't look like that, or the rabbit never does this, that or the other ...? What's the matter with me?" As new cooks are brought in to stir the brand-broth, the three-ring binders swell to bursting. These days, it is not enough merely to specify that Mr. Peanut never speaks, but can make the occasional hand gestures. No, the five approved hand gestures -- the wave, the thumbs-up sign, the shake of the hand, the tip of hat and the ability to hand out product samples -- must be individually enumerated and communicated as a mandate to all vendors wishing to do business with Peanut. Likewise, the Green Giant company has let it be known that the Jolly Green Giant may only wear his red scarf when advertising frozen vegetables; and that there are certain things he can and can't do in the valley. (He can never shake his fist, for instance.) | ||
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