Use characters to convey concepts

Conveying a complex concept to an audience in a simple and compelling way can be tough. One creative trick is to associate it with a specific character – it opens up very distinct, creative ways to communicate. Geico, for example, uses a gecko with a British accent in its ads (example below) to convey the company’s service attitude – simple, straightforward and friendly. The gecko has since become the most recognizable insurance-industry mascot. It doesn’t matter that he is a lizard – people like to attach human characteristics to non-human things so all Geico had to do was give us something we could latch onto i.e., the gecko’s charming accent and affable manner.

A 2002 IKEA commercial (below) infused a table lamp with humanity by showing it being removed from its home and left rejected and alone on a sidewalk with the trash. A similar lamp character could easily be used in an energy-saving campaign reminding employees to turn off their electrical devices at the end of the day. (When left on all night, alone in an empty office, the lamp becomes sad.)

Uses for this technique

A team mascot, "Galida Gus," emerged from a flowchart we drew of the team charter.

Using a personality to express an entire brand is a big job, so let’s leave that one alone. There are other, more manageable uses such as conveying a competency (e.g. customer service, tech savvy, health & safety, teamwork) to internal or external customers. I once worked with a pharma team that had just been convened; the mandate was to develop a drug for commercialization. The team was about five years from launch so it had nothing concrete to rally around – just a product name, Galida.

One day we were doing a team exercise – establishing vision and so on – and the diagram I had drawn on the flipchart began to look like a character. The team embraced it as “Galida Gus.” I used my graphic skills to give it a bit of personality and voilà, a mascot was born. Gus came to represent the team bond – there’s an “us” in Gus – which served them when Galida was later cancelled.

The starting point

In a previous post I talked about using the Twin Trigger Exercise to create metaphors that trigger ideas. Thinking of a human or animal character as a metaphor for your concept is the starting place per the Fido brand example (metaphor is “reliable phone = reliable dog”). It’s a different approach than the Geico gecko because Fido focused on the general concept of faithful dogs vs. choosing one particular dog to represent its brand. In turn, this metaphor stimulated some terrific creative – you may recall Fido’s campaign around the physical similarities between dogs and their owners.

Step 2 of Twin Trigger is listing the attributes of your concept. At that point, you can break away from the exercise to browse through some visuals that may evoke those attributes. An efficient route is a royalty-free stock photography site e.g. iclipart.com where you can browse through categories for animals, wildlife, people, characters, etc. Then you can grab any image that works.

About the lizard thing…

My inspiration for this post was some micro photography on pokkisam.com of insects and lizards. Two of my favourites are below – to me, they instantly convey personality. Related to the ideas below is a previous post, Provoke with Photography.

This lizard could represent a company's ability to manage two divergent work streams simultaneously.

This lizard could represent a ugly problem that has been positioned (unconvincingly) as desirable.