Brand Mascots

Brand mascots are characters created to give a product a face people remember.

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StayFree · Updated 7 Nov 2026 · Facts cited to public sources; ads shown only when public domain or licensed

Food and fast-food mascots

Entries below list the brand and the year.

Each entry names the brand that uses the mascot and the earliest year the character appears in public company or trade-press history; fast-food and packaged-food brands make up the largest single group of long-running mascots in American advertising.

Household and insurance mascots

Table rows are listed below.

Insurance brands adopted mascots later than food brands, mostly from the late 1990s onward, as advertisers looked for a recognizable face in an increasingly crowded TV and online market.

Why brands use mascots

Each claim links to a public source.

A consistent character gives a brand a face that is easier to recall than a logo or slogan alone, and a mascot can carry a brand’s personality across decades of changing ad campaigns without the brand itself changing. Several of the mascots above have run for 50 years or more, updated in style but not in concept.

Mascots also let a brand speak directly to a specific audience without the message sounding like a sales pitch: a cartoon tiger or a rabbit can make a safety reminder, a flavor claim or a price point feel playful rather than corporate, which is one reason food and cereal brands adopted the format earliest and most heavily.

A redesign does not usually replace a mascot outright; most of the characters above have been restyled several times — a new art style, a straighter posture, brighter colors — while keeping the same name and role, so decades of brand recognition carry over instead of restarting from zero.

Dates and credits come from public sources; report an error on the contact page.

See two mascots in more depth: cereal mascots and Tony the Tiger.