Wenlock Not Welcome...

The mascots for the 2012 London Olympics were unveiled this week, and I have to say, many were far from impressed. Wenlock, the Olympic mascot and Mandeville, the Paralympic mascot are the weirdest creatures I have ever seen and being decorated with the Royal Jack does not make them seem any more British. I have read them being compared with Pokémon, aliens and characters from “In The Night Garden”, none of which is what I think the design company, Iris, were striving for when they conjured them up. In this blog post, I am going to discuss whether the motives the organisers had when designing these mascots will work.

Lord Coe has said the inspiration around the designs was to appeal to children and “to help them strive to be the best they can be.” As much as I am sure that children may find these characters funny and somewhat entertaining, I do not think this will inspire them. As Aaron Shields, a partner at the design company Brand Instinct, said: “I don’t think people are going to relate to these very modern creations. The first rule of mascot creation is to make something familiar and accessible, not something alien. This is just going to be seen as another disappointment coming out of the Olympic games.”

I have to agree; although mascot creation is more marketing than PR, anyone can see that these mascots are an error of judgement. When I go to the Olympics in 2012, I want to see a mascot I am proud of, not something which will embarrass us in front of hundreds of countries and millions of viewers. This isn’t a small scale event - and the mascots are a big part of the event being a success. Merchandise adorned with both Wenlock and Mandeville will be sold at the Olympics, with the hope of earning millions of pounds off the back of them. But how many people can really say that they would buy a tea towel with these guys on them? Maybe as a memento of our failure...

The choice of children as a target audience was more of a message move than a money move. It’s a great message to try and inspire children to be more involved in sport, especially in a country where obesity is such an issue. But by deciding to design the mascot around what children would enjoy, the organisers are shutting out adults who have the money to buy the merchandise. It’s all very well that the children enjoy them and become inspired (which as I’ve already said is not likely), but without the spending power of the adults on board, the point of the mascots is lost. Visitors to the Olympics will predominantly be adults, viewers of the Olympics at home will most likely be adults. I don’t really understand where the idea to centre a mascot around children came from. It’s a good idea to design something children will like as well as adults but not to focus only on one target audience. 

Another area the Olympic organisers fell down in was their reaction to the backlash. As Mark Ritson comments in his Marketing Week (27 May 2010) article, “The design team from Iris had been briefed so forcefully on how to defend its creation, you could see the key messages from half a mile away. The design had cost ‘just a few thousand pounds’, there was a brand heritage story in which Wenlock’s name came from the Shropshire town that inspired the modern Olympic movement, and his body from the last drop of steel used to manufacture the new Olympic Stadium. Plus the design had been guided by public reaction with ‘over 40 focus groups’ commissioned as part of the process.”

Lets break this down. Having to comment that the design only cost a few thousand pounds is quite a defensive reaction. To me, it sounds like ‘Yeah, the designs rubbish but don’t worry, it only cost a few thousand pounds.’ It works in a society where we are now worrying about how much the government is wasting on things. The audience will tend to compensate for how bad the design is by reassuring themselves that at least not much money was spent on it. But it doesn’t change the audience’s mind that the mascots are absurd. Verdict: weak defence.

Second, the brand heritage story. I hate this. What a load of rubbish?! The organisers brought in Michael Morpurgo to come up with a story to go with the mascots. I’m sorry, but not even children are going to engage with the fact he supposedly came from the last drop of steel for the Olympic stadium. If they didn’t look like such aliens, it would not have been necessary to dream up a story to explain their existence. It does not add to anything and from a PR standpoint, is just a load of fluff to use in their story. Verdict: waste of time and money.

Finally, the focus groups. This is where it really backfired for them. While the designers at Iris were confidently saying that they had conducted 40 focus groups to defend their designs, everyone who has ever learnt anything about research methods was thinking ’40, are you crazy?’ You should only ever do a small number of focus groups in your research. It is a Qualitative method - quality not quantity. And if you need more feedback, you should use what you’ve learnt in the focus groups to form Quantitative research. 40 focus groups will not provide useful data representative of the population, and this can clearly be seen by the public outcry against Wenlock and Mandeville. Verdict: blatant display of incompetence.

After the scandal caused when the 2012 logo was unveiled, I expected more from the mascots. Instead, designers everywhere are denouncing the mascots as “calamitous failures” (Stephen Bayley, Telegraph, 19 May 2010). The organisers must have been expecting scrutiny on all sides and I would have expected an Olympian effort to surprise us with outstanding mascots but instead, they have only furthered the belief that the Olympics is a disaster waiting to happen. The problem is, we have no say in the matter and can only wait and see what unfolds...