There is a Gritty plush in a shop window in the Pearl. Orange, googly-eyed, vaguely threatening, entirely beloved. A hockey mascot from Philadelphia, sitting in a Portland gift shop nine months after somebody invented him, selling to people who have never watched a Flyers game.
Twenty years ago the trend line ran the other direction. Mascots were what a brand had before it got serious. They came off the packaging along with the drop shadow and the bevel.
They are coming back, and they are coming back stranger.
A logo asks to be recognized, a character asks to be felt about, and affinity is the faster road to the part of the brain that actually decides.
Three reasons this is happening now. One, feeds are hostile to logos. A wordmark in a scrolling column is furniture. A face is a face, and people stop for faces whether they mean to or not. Two, characters can say things brands cannot. The Duolingo owl can guilt you about your abandoned Spanish streak in a register no corporate account would survive using in its own voice. Three, mascots are a workaround for the blandification of everything. When every company in a category has converged on the same sans serif and the same three-color palette, a weird animal is a difference nobody can quietly copy.
The weirdness is not decoration. It is the mechanism. Gritty works because nobody sanded him down before release. Mailchimp's Freddie survived an entire rebrand because he had a personality before he had a style guide. The mascots that fail are the ones designed by committee to be maximally likable, which reliably produces a shape rather than a character.
Here is the part that gets lost in the mascot briefs I have watched get written from inside brand strategy rooms. A character is a commitment, not an asset. He has opinions, and once he has them you cannot quietly revise them next quarter because a new CMO prefers blue. He ages. He has to behave consistently on the day the news is bad. Most brands want the affinity without the constraint, and that is how you end up with a friendly gradient blob that means nothing to anyone including the people who paid for it.
So the test before you commission one is not whether he is cute. It is whether you can describe what he refuses to do.
A character is a commitment, not an asset.
Barnaby has better mascot instincts than most of the work I have reviewed this year. He has exactly one bit, he performs it at six fifteen every single morning on the corner of the bed, and he has never once modernized it, softened it, or run it past a focus group. I resent him for this. I also get up.