Chaos Magnet

Mediocrity as a way of longevity

Now here's an interesting piece of analysis. Garfield has been around since 1978, and we don't hate him yet. But nobody's ever going to call cartoonist Jim Davis a genious -- unless they understand marketing. In Garfield - Why we hate the Mouse but not the cartoon copycat we see that the lasagna-loving cat was specifically designed as a marketing machine, and man, has it worked. But the most interesting part is that part of the formula for success lies in not being greedy. Davis understands that if Garfield gets too popular, he'll be easy to hate; his popularity depends on his inoffensiveness.

In the late 1980s, Garfield plush toys with suction-cup feet were so popular than criminals broke into cars to steal them and sell them on the black market. Davis, protective of his creation's unobjectionable blandness, knew he had to act fast before people began to hate Garfield. "We accepted the royalty checks, but my biggest fear was overexposure," he told Entertainment Weekly in 1998. "We pulled all plush dolls off the shelves for five years."

Technorati tags: Garfield | marketing |

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