I was trawling through my archives today searching for something, when I stumbled across The Big Hippo Bathroom Company project.

I couldn’t resist taking a peek at that project, which was completed in 2005, because it was quite a quirky and enjoyable design.

The brief was to combine the company name along with a lovable hippo character involved in some sort of bath time activity, hence our cutie above.

Whilst admiring the little guy, I thought to myself ‘I never did check to see if the website went live’ (it was at a time before I really offered web design as a service I believe), and so toodled over to Google, keyed in their company name and hey presto:

www.bighippo.co.uk

Well I was really pleased when I saw it, clearly for the website they’ve zoomed in on the character to get a close up on the face that can’t be achieved in this space with the bath in the scene also, and possibly this is the portion of the character they are now using across the board for all of their brand materials.

It was great to see that the character has been well integrated into the web design, lending a real warmth and friendliness to the brand, and the business appears to be thriving

Obviously this character is a company mascot, and is a very common method of company branding - big brands that have used mascots include;

- Kellogs; Tony the Tiger (Frosties),

- Quaker; The Honey Monster (Sugar Puffs).

And whilst it’s common for children targeted products or services to use illustrated or puppet mascots, even companies targeting different markets have used mascots to great effect, for example;

- MacDonalds; Ronald McDonald, although Ronald seems to have disappeared from the scene of recent years hasn’t he …notice we haven’t forgotten him yet though.

- Hoffmeister Beer; The Hoffmeister Bear.

- Michelin; The Michelin Man.

Company mascots help a business to put a face to the brand, and if you can bring your mascot to life in the flesh or on tv they are great at generating media interest and in turn exposure for your business.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 7:54 pm and is filed under Design Projects, Thoughts on Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.