Advertising characters and icons are so prevalent in American culture that they sometimes transcend the companies they were created to represent. For instance, last fall ABC debuted “Cavemen,” a sitcom based on the Neanderthal-like ad characters in popular commercials for car insurance company Geico. With apologies to the hypersensitive homo sapiens turned TV stars, a restaurateur would have to be living in a cave to miss the same dynamic effect brand icons have in the foodservice industry.
Successful brand icons go beyond active, widely recognized spokespeople on TV, be they actual people like Jared Fogle of Subway fame or Jack in the Box’s make-believe chief executive, Jack. Ronald McDonald is not featured regularly in McDonald’s commercials anymore, but Ronald McDonald House Charities serve seriously ill children and their families. Meanwhile, Burger King still produces TV spots for The King, and his popularity has been leveraged to create video games and Halloween costumes. KFC has petitioned the U.S. Postal Service to create a postage stamp in honor of its founder, Col. Harland Sanders.
Restaurant icons created for more than merely selling a product make sense for brands trying to stand out in a crowded marketplace, especially one like the quick-service segment, says Jim Hardison, creative director of Portland, Ore.-based Character LLC, a marketing services firm specializing in creating ad characters.
“There are so many fast-food companies right now, and the major competitors offer fairly similar food,” Hardison says. “They need some way to quickly distinguish themselves from what is out there. A character gives your brand a sense of personality and definitely helps with awareness.”
As with any effective character from film or literature, brand icons work best when they convey a dramatic story about a restaurant, Hardison says.
“In a world where there is an awful lot of choice available at essentially the same level, what distinguishes a brand is the story that it tells,” he says. “It’s about conflict and finding a way to crystallize that conflict. The first instinct is to minimize that conflict, but that’s such a boring story if there’s no conflict to overcome.”
Few characters embodied a restaurant’s struggle like the Noid, the red-clad menace created by then-fledgling Domino’s Pizza in the 1980s. The Noid, according to Domino’s TV spots back then, was what caused delivered pizzas to be cold, soggy or stuck to the box. The upstart chain made its reputation by claiming to “avoid the Noid” and deliver unscathed pizzas in 30 minutes, says Tim McIntyre, vice president of corporate communications for the Ann Arbor. Mich.-based chain.
“The Noid was the anti-mascot, and he helped build awareness for the brand,” McIntyre says. However, even after the Noid had become popular enough to warrant its own Nintendo video game, the character began to outlive its usefulness.
“As things happened,” he says, “in an entrepreneurial company with phenomenal growth, there were a multitude of leaders in marketing, a lot of turnover and many ad agencies, and the Noid went away. It had served its purpose, and it fell victim to ‘Not Invented Here Syndrome.’ The person who invented the Noid left, the person who followed wanted to create his own advertising identity, as did the person after that and after that. People wanted to create their own slogans and icons.”
Several characters followed. The Mad Dr. Cravin and Bad Andy starred in TV spots in the late ’90s, and Fudgems was introduced in 2006 to promote the chain’s Brownie Squares limited-time offering. Going forward, McIntyre says, Domino’s branding will focus on a signature idea rather than a character.
“Some companies long to have their own Tony the Tiger or their own [Budweiser] Clydesdales and Geico gecko,” McIntyre says. “We tried that, but we think that if there’s a brand icon that represents Dominos, it’s the idea of 30-minute delivery.”
Domino’s latest TV commercials carry the tag “You’ve got 30 minutes,” which is meant to emphasize Domino’s goal—though not a guarantee, McIntyre stresses—of prompt delivery.
“Basically, the [current] advertising is about the consumer,” McIntyre says. “In the ’80s and ’90s our advertising was about us, and these new ads are talking to consumers about the fact that if you order from Domino’s, we’ve just given you 30 minutes of your life back.”
Many restaurant chains still tell their stories with brand icons, and for some, publicizing a real person’s connection with a foodservice brand can be a successful strategy for years, as was the case with Subway spokesman Fogle or Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas.
“As long as the connection to the brand is fairly clear, it’s easy enough for the audience to understand why a person’s talking to them about the food,” character consultant Hardison says. “There aren’t as many celebrities endorsing restaurants now because the connection to the food isn’t as obvious or compelling.
The character has to be authentically connected to the story of the brand.… If that’s kept in focus, and if it’s honest, a character can stay pretty evergreen for a company. Its relevance isn’t really about how a character looks, but how it looks at things and the attitude it has.”
For many years, Wendy’s featured Thomas in its TV commercials. When the familiar face of the No. 3 burger brand died in 2002, Wendy’s lost the person who embodied its values to the public, says spokesman Denny Lynch.
“Wendy’s lost an American icon, somebody in the advertising hall of fame,” Lynch says. “Dave’s image on television created instant recognition with Wendy’s.… Having name recognition like that for advertising is enormous, and you can’t replace that.”
Like Domino’s, Wendy’s new TV spots focus on a concept that company officials want to tout as a point of differentiation: its use of fresh, never-frozen beef. Actors in the new commercials emphasize the words “hot, juicy burger.”
“Everybody knew Wendy’s as something associated with Dave: a warm, friendly and caring personality, versus a hard, cold national chain,” Lynch says. “Now we have to use words and adjectives to take the place of Dave, and the copy messages we’re using are trying to reach a responsive chord with consumers.”
To accompany those copy messages, Wendy’s also is employing vibrant visual images based on the red hair of Wendy’s mascot in their logo. Actors in most new TV spots wear a wig of red pigtails to accentuate that recognizable image.
“The red-wig commercials are a new version of a part of our history that consumers understand, know and think kindly about,” Lynch says. “It’s no surprise, if you’ve read the news articles, that we’re using those commercials to talk to a younger audience, the 18- to 34-year-old males and females. That’s the core target of all of QSR, not just Wendy’s.”
Wendy’s still finds ways to keep Dave Thomas around, though. The story of his legacy is publicized on posters and other signage in the stores, but his image and teachings are used most in internal materials, such as employee training manuals and instructional videos and a company intranet site, Lynch says.
“What customers see are posters and point-of-purchase materials that talk about the values that Dave believed in,” he says. “We utilize Dave’s values and legacies a lot more internally than we do externally.”
