From the recent rise of the Duolingo owl to the cultural mainstay that is the Laughing Cow, animal mascots have long been—and long continue to be—part of our branding and marketing landscape. It seems like there’s just something about a furry face and a cute smiling animal on our screens that makes us want to click and share… but why? And how can you, as a marketing expert, harness the power of cute to boost your brand’s online presence?
Animal mascots and virality
In today’s digital ecosystem, animal mascots can often go viral overnight, helping to establish an emotional connection and build a sense of brand identity with speed that traditional marketing strategies often struggle to achieve. As anyone with an MBA in Marketing online can tell you, using an animal mascot can (ironically) ‘humanize’ a brand because it can make the brand seem more ‘relatable’ and can give it a fresh, cute image that might make it less intimidating.
Brands often lack personality or identity because they don’t have a face or a mouth—rather, many brands simply act as nebulous organisations that provide a service. By using an animal mascot and having that mascot interact with the world or deliver messages, a brand can essentially create a new identity through which the audience can relate to the brand and remember its messages.
A case study: The Duolingo Owl
For example, the Duolingo owl (nicknamed Duo’) is something of a star on TikTok, with 14.3 million followers and 348.3 million total likes on its videos at the time of writing (January 2025)—and this is only expected to go up. Duo’s virality happened somewhat organically, when users noticed and started posting jokes about the owl’s passive-aggressive reminders to study back in 2017, but then the brand leaned into the joke by pretending that the owl was purposely vaguely threatening to those who skipped their daily language-learning streak.
Over time, the brand has created an entire personality and backstory (or lore, one could say) for its mascot—Duo has a crush on pop star Dua Lipa, and there’s even apparently some drama between the company’s legal and PR teams with which the mascot is involved.
Now, users feel like they know the owl, and by extension, know the brand, and are therefore invested in the owl as something of an influencer or celebrity. All this just means more exposure for Duolingo, more sign-ups, and eventually, more revenue for the bottom line.
Real animals, too?
And it’s not only fake animals that are being used in marketing nowadays—it seems like every month, there’s a new real animal celebrity. For example, take Moo Deng, an adorable pygmy hippo at Khao Kheow Open Zoo in Thailand, who recently went viral on Instagram and TikTok for her playful antics. The hippo’s popularity has led to huge crowds of more than 10,000 visitors flocking to the zoo to see her play. For context, the zoo normally receives between 800 and 900 visitors on weekdays and about 4,000 on holidays.
If you haven’t heard of Moo Deng, then perhaps you’ve heard of Pesto the penguin, a chubby King Penguin chick at Sea Life Melbourne Aquarium who has millions of online devotees and counts Katy Perry and Olivia Rodrigo as some of his personal fans. There are even official Australian news articles following the penguin’s growth—he’s apparently now in his “awkward teenage phase”.
As humans, we are quite literally hardwired to like cute things—cute things activate our orbitofrontal cortex, which is linked to emotion and pleasure. That’s why cute animals doing cute things can be great business for zoos or other animal-related businesses like vets, dog groomers, or even non-animal related businesses, as was the case with this museum in Japan that went viral after video footage of a security guard turning away two cats at the entrance (who then returned, persistently) was shown online, generating mock outrage at the injustice of it all.
At the end of the day, whether it’s a cartoon mascot or a real animal celebrity, what we’re learning increasingly is that cute animals representing your organization can be fantastic business in the 21st century. So, if you’re working in an animal-adjacent field, or even if you’re not, it might be time to start casting calls for your next four-legged global star.
