Anyone who knows me knows I have a guilty pleasure: I love a good brand mascot. They’re not right for every brand, but when they click, few things make a brand more memorable.

I grew up on mascots. Toucan Sam, Poppin’ Fresh, the Energizer Bunny, Mr. Clean, the Green Giant. These characters weren’t just decorations. They had personalities, stories, and staying power. You could recognize them without ever seeing a logo. Then the hipsters showed up, and suddenly mascots were uncool. Trite, even.

Some brands tried to make their characters relevant again by “modernizing” them. Cue the Creepy, er, Burger King and skateboarding Chuck E. Cheese. A handful pulled it off. Others were spectacular fails because they forgot the mascot’s actual job: to personify how you want your brand to be perceived. Slap a Starbucks attitude onto a roll of toilet paper and, yes, of course it fails. That’s on the advertiser. Not the mascot.

Mascots and characters play into my original reason for getting into this business: I started as an illustrator. One of my favorite projects ever was creating a campaign of cartoon talking noses and ears for an ENT practice. Those characters helped turn medical problems into something approachable, memorable, and even fun; the campaign is still running today. I’ve also pitched grumpy knees for pain relief medicine, pigs in lipstick for a parody brand, and test tubes dressed as guards for a cancer detection test. Not every idea made it into the world, but each started with a strategic purpose.

That’s the beauty of good brand mascot design. A character can take the edge off a difficult subject, make a complicated idea easier to understand, or communicate a personality in a split second. Sometimes a pair of googly eyes can accomplish what an abstract symbol and 40 words of copy never could. But those googly eyes had better have the right reason for being there.

A successful brand character needs the same strategic thinking as any other part of a visual identity. Who is it? What does it represent? How does it behave? Does it belong in the brand’s world? And, most importantly, will people remember it for the right reasons? A well-designed mascot becomes a familiar face and a mental shortcut to everything you want your brand to stand for. It can build recognition, create an emotional connection, and give people something to genuinely like about your advertising. And in a world already overflowing with forgettable messages, that’s no small thing.

Long live the good brand mascot.