Puppy Love: why cute animals sell us eveything.

Why do advertisers use cute animals to sell us everything from toilet roll and insurance to paint, tea and batteries? In this episode of Mark and Pete, we celebrate Britain’s most memorable advertising animals, from the Andrex puppy and Compare the Market meerkats to the Dulux dog, Churchill the bulldog and those slightly unnerving PG Tips chimps.Because there is a principle here. A very successful one.Brands discovered long ago that if the product itself is dull, technical, embarrassing or simply not terribly lovable, attaching a cute animal to it can work wonders. Toilet paper is toilet paper. Insurance comparison websites are not exactly objects of affection. Paint is useful, but few people have ever gazed misty-eyed at a tin of emulsion.Then along comes a Labrador puppy.Suddenly the product feels warm, soft, friendly and familiar.The Andrex puppy first appeared in 1972 and became one of the longest-running advertising mascots in Britain. The Compare the Market meerkats arrived in 2009, built around the magnificently silly joke of confusing “market” with “meerkat”, and rapidly became more famous than many actual television personalities. Aleksandr and Sergei gave a comparison website something it badly needed: a personality.Then there is the Dulux dog. The Old English Sheepdog first appeared in advertising in the 1960s after one reportedly wandered into filming and looked so good that the company simply kept him. Sensible decision. There have since been generations of Dulux dogs, all selling the reassuring idea of home, comfort and slightly expensive paint.But why do these animals work so well?Partly it is what psychologists call “baby schema”. Big eyes, rounded faces, soft features and slightly helpless expressions trigger protective and affectionate responses in us. We anthropomorphise animals too, giving them voices, motives, personalities and little imaginary lives. Once that happens, the mascot stops being decoration and becomes someone we recognise.And recognition matters enormously in advertising.A recurring character can make a brand instantly identifiable before we have even properly registered the product. That is why mascots often survive for decades while advertising executives, slogans and entire marketing departments come and go.In this episode, Mark and Pete ask why cute animals are such powerful selling tools, remember the advertising mascots Britain grew up with, look at the psychology behind them and wonder whether modern advertising became less memorable when it stopped giving us puppies, meerkats, bulldogs and sheepdogs.Perhaps brands did not need more influencers.Perhaps they just needed a dog.