Can cartoons be a marketing tool? Can cartoon characters like Mickey and Donald act as sales characters selling different products? The idea of marketing to children has been always interesting to me. In fact, I noticed that in many marketing textbooks, there's always a special section dedicated to children marketing, as if the child is a very different kind of consumer, with specific strategies that have to be directed to him, in order to make him desire a certain product. This led me to conduct an extensive research project about that topic. But don't think I have that leisure time to do researches. This project was a university assignment of course!
When I started searching about the relationship between cartoon characters and products that use them to make kids buy them, I found out that there are three ways in which cartoons can be used as marketing tools. I am interested in the third way, but let me tell you the three. By the way, this is not a scientific conclusion. I categorized them that way, maybe other researchers see them differently.
The first way by which companies can use cartoons to market their product is to actually create special cartoon characters specifically for their products. These characters will be associated with the product and endorse it in any form of promotional material: whether ads, posters, or any other form of promotion. Take Nesquik for example. Instead of using any well known cartoon character, Nesquik created the Nesquik bunny. You can only see him in Nesquik related promotions and not in any cartoon show.
The second method is to choose a cartoon character that has become so popular. Then, you go and take a license from its producers to use that character in your marketing efforts to market your company's products. This is the most common form of cartoon marketing. Food companies, such as Keloggs, heavily use this method. Once a cartoon show is popular and successful, they use it on the cereal's cover.
But what really triggers me is the third way of using cartoons for marketing: when you make a cartoon show and while you are making it you know that it's not just a cartoon but a whole line of products that will be launched shortly after the program starts its airing on TV. Pokemon is one example. How would you explain that Nintendo, the famous game boy company, is one of the show's producers? Not only Pokemon, there are other cartoons that have a whole product line sold in most toy stores. Beyblade (see picture), Let's Go (Sabek and Lahek), and Super Sonnic Spinner are all applicable examples.
I'll tell you the procedure: First, they start with an idea, say a young boy who likes to travel and play sports and stuff. This idea is then tailored and modified because it has to include something 'collectable' that children can buy once they see the show. It is this word "collection" that sums the whole thing up. Any commercial show that is mainly done for commercial purposes and not just to entertain kids, has to include something (or things) that the child will want to collect, otherwise, his friends will call him a loser! These shows enforce a kind of "love of possession" among kids and I am not exaggerating when I use this term.
I'll prove it to you. First of all, the slogan of the Pokemon series is "collect them all', and them refers to the Pokemon related products, especially card games and action figures. Today there are hundreds of Pokemon related products, ranging from simple books to card games, T shirts, action figures..etc. At a certain time, there was a real Pokemon "frenzy". Kids were mad about the show and they went crazy, trying to collect almost anything that has the Pokemon logo. This 'collect them all' idea made Saudi Arabia actually ban the Pokemon show, not because it's immoral but because they believed that it controlled kids' minds and kind of hypnotized them to buy any Pokemon product they find at the toy store.
Lately, I have been noticing a new phenomenon. If you are a heavy viewer of Space Toon TV, as I am, you'll notice that the channel, though it's a cartoon channel, yet it has a clearly commercial tone. I believe that their criteria when choosing the cartoons they air is not just whether they are moral and stuff, but whether they hold any marketing opportunity. For example, every summer season, the channel airs new cartoon shows. 60% of these shows have lots of related products that the channel starts to advertise simultaneously with the launch of the show. Inside a Beyblade show for example, you'd find lots of Beyblade related toy ads. One of the channel's owners (or shareholders) is a toy company that takes licenses to distribute these cartoon related toys in the Middle East. That of course explains it. If the channel can air cartoons that have related products, this will being lots of profit!
Is this ethical? I have been always asking myself that question. Probably, I'll never decide, because on one side: I think that it's any company's right to make a profit from selling a cartoon related character. But on the other side, I think that there is some manipulation (or call it exploitation) that is taking place here. I mean it's unethical to tell the kid in the ad that if you don't own the whole set, you'll be a loser and seem out-dated because all your friends will have the toys and you'll be left behind. Yet someone would say that parents have a role here to control their kids' purchases, but tell you what: it's mostly kids who influence their parents and not vice versa. Kids have a nagging power where they cry, shout and throw themselves on the ground if you don’t buy them what they want. So, it's the parent who pays but it's usually the child who makes the purchase decision.
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