Don’t Train a Duck, but Do Use Cartoons to Build Your Brand

I met Brad Shorr at SOBCon earlier this month – it turns out he lives the next town away from me! As he started explaining to me his cartoon business, I begged him for a guest post. Humor is a powerful branding and selling machine, so check out Brad’s suggestions below!

Humor transforms brands. Everybody has heard of GEICO, the insurance firm with a gecko spokesman since 1999 – but did you know the company has been around since 1936? Another insurance company, Aflac, enjoys 90% name recognition thanks to its celebrity duck, even though most Americans don’t even know exactly what Aflac does. In the decidedly unfunny business of janitorial and maintenance supplies, New Pig Corporation has mopped up market share with help from a cartoon pig. And just for the record, animals are not required for injecting humor into a brand. Hormel keeps the SPAM name alive and well with an extremely silly SPAM Web site, and paper towel maker Georgia-Pacific caused quite a stir recently with a satirical online reality show, Brawny Academy.

Humor is an equal opportunity branding technique. It matters not whether the product is supplemental health insurance or processed pork, because all people like to laugh. Make ‘em laugh in a way that makes them connect with your brand, and serious business opportunities will follow.

Nobody Can Resist a Cartoon

You don’t have to be a multi-national with a six-figure marketing budget to be funny – most of my cartoon clients are entrepreneurs and small businesses. One-panel and two-panel cartoons are reasonably priced. I can create cartoons about your business or industry that feature your company’s logo, Web address, and even a caricature. Clients use them in many ways. Here are a few -

l Electronic newsletters and landing pages. Putting a cartoon above the fold is almost guaranteed to hold subscribers, attract new ones, and increase conversions.

l Mailings. One client sends a cartoon every month to hard-to-reach B2B prospects, along with product literature. The prospects forget the literature, but remember the cartoons and my client. It’s generating leads.

l Presentations. This cartoon was for a client who runs management workshops for multi-national companies. The purpose – to reduce complex ideas down to a simple, memorable concept. There were eight cartoons in the series; I believe he gives attendees printed copies as a leave-behind.

l Print media placement. In this very fun project, I partnered up with a client and placed a cartoon strip in a major trade publication. It’s a revealing case study of how traditional media meets conversational marketing.

l Advertisements. For print or online media, cartoons grab better than most photography and graphic design. Who can resist reading a one-panel cartoon?

l E-books and videocasts. I think there’s a market here – maybe it’s you!

The thing I love about cartoons is that very few people use them. With all the noise in today’s marketplace, how do you get heard? Cartoons give you the element of surprise in its most enjoyable form. You know the feeling you get when your friends and family throw you a surprise party? Take that warm, joyful, and extremely in-the-moment feeling (scaled back a good bit), and that’s how customers and prospects react to a branded cartoon. Not to sound overly dramatic, but I really believe cartoons open doors by opening hearts. When you build a business relationship with an emotional connection, instead of simply an intellectual one, it lasts longer and runs deeper. The big brands figured this out ages ago, and there’s no reason you can’t join the party.