Second Tuesday of the month, sticky floor, Southeast Portland, a host who calls every single person baby and means it. I had just finished a structurally unsound version of Total Eclipse of the Heart. A copywriter I have known for six years bought me a beer and told me, unprompted, that his client wanted a dog for a mascot because dogs test well.
I said dogs test well the way beige tests well. He said prove it. So here is the proof, three weeks late.
A dog mascot is a promise of eagerness. Bullseye at Target, Duke selling beans, the chihuahua that ran Taco Bell for a few years in the nineties. Every one of them is performing availability. I am here, I am thrilled, please like me. It works, the way a very friendly salesperson works, until the customer starts to wonder why you need their approval so badly.
A cat mascot is doing the opposite job. Felix, the Chessie kitten, Hello Kitty, Tony the Tiger, loosely. None of them are asking. They have already decided, and the customer is invited to agree.
A mascot is not a pet. It is a posture, and the posture tells your customer exactly what the relationship is going to cost them.
This matters more than it sounds. The brands that have done the best work this decade are not the eager ones. Supreme built an empire on being visibly uninterested in whether you get a hoodie. Patagonia ran an ad telling you not to buy the jacket. Both are cat behavior: standards first, affection maybe, on a schedule the brand sets.
Eagerness is easy to fake and therefore worth very little. Indifference is expensive, because you can only be indifferent to demand if you actually have some.
Eagerness is easy to fake and therefore worth very little.
I am not arguing every brand should be aloof. Aloof without substance is just rude, and I have watched this go wrong from inside brand strategy rooms, where somebody decides the new voice is confident and what arrives is a company that will not answer its own email.
The cat move only works if the product earns it. Salt & Straw can have a line out the door in February because the ice cream justifies standing in the rain. A brand with no line and a smirk is doing cosplay.
So, to the copywriter, if you are reading this: get the dog if the client genuinely wants to be loved and is prepared to work for it. Get the cat if the client has something worth wanting. Get neither if the answer is that mascots test well.
I came home from karaoke that night, voice shot, and neither Truffles nor Barnaby looked up. I have lived with them for four years. They have never once performed enthusiasm, and I keep buying the food anyway.