Hello and welcome to our lunchtime webinar on characters and fandom, more specifically, how and why we connect to characters and how we can use fandom-growth thinking to deepen connections further.
I'm Josh, associate director of research at kids industries, and we have about 20 minutes together today to talk through some interesting stuff around characters. Then at the end, I can answer any questions you might have. And for me, if you leave here having learned just one new thing, I'll be happy with that. So on that note, let's jump in.
So first of all, why characters? Well, characters and personalities are the lifeblood of our stories, and they sit at the heart of our brands. So just on a top line level, they drive meaningful connection, and they represent our values. And in the case of most of my favourite characters, they do really cool shit that I want to see again and again. So quite important stuff. And at kids industries, we've had the privilege to be a part of most characters you can think of, including those displayed nicely here, which is why it's something that we think about quite a lot. But like everything else in the world, there's a lot to contend with as a character.
There's more personality led UGC being watched than ever before. AI is taking over the world, and things like reading and engaging with traditional media is on decline, and overall, the audience's time can be spread quite thin across many different things. So it's not an easy world to navigate.
This is in part, where our fandom model comes into things. It can give us an additional boost and help us work out and deepen the relationships that we have with our audience. And I'll introduce this properly a little bit later on.
Today, we're going to do two things. We're going to share some principles and insights that we look to when creating characters, and then through the lens of our fandom model, explore how we can deepen character connections further, and we'll look at some brand examples here to draw inspiration from. So starting with the first part, as if we've not got enough to contend with making Fauci characters in the first place isn't a walk in the park. We can think of all the great things that we love about our favorite characters. So Darth Vader's helmet, Barb's fashion sense, SpongeBob humor, but if we smush them all together, it doesn't quite work. You do that, and you might end up with a bit frankentoon.
We created frankentoon to highlight the breadth and depth of how we might connect with characters. And whilst it's fun to imagine Darth Vader in a banging dress. Our characters can't really be everything at once. So when we're thinking about this, whether designing new characters or refining the purpose of existing ones, we work through five stages, just five to ensure characters are well established, clear and relevant to the audience. It's a process that starts with defining who our characters are at a top line level, their demographics, which is obvious, right? We almost don't need to mention it.
Then adding more detail around we want the audience to view them, what their role is, their behaviors and their signifiers. With the final check at the end of whether they're actually meeting the goals that we set out for them to reach. We've only got 20 minutes, so we won't go through all of them in detail, but the two that we thought you might find most interesting and useful that we sometimes see ebb and flow are identification patterns and roles and behaviors. So let's start with identification.
Across our work with characters, we consistently find that there are four key identification patterns that young audiences connect with, and this is the same for each child across the globe. We have nurturing identification. So wanting to nurture the character like Boo from Monsters Inc or Grogu from the Mandalorian, or perhaps be nurtured by them. In the case of Sully or Obi Wan Kenobi, they have reflective identification. This is seeing yourself in those characters. Peter Parker and Hermione Granger can sit here as they are. Then we have emulatory identification. You want to be a bit like them, and then try to embody some of their amazing traits to show it, so Superman here is a bit of something that we all want a bit of. Then disidentification, connecting with those darker elements, pushing boundaries and testing the moral waters. And we're going to zoom in on that a little bit more now.
In previous years, this identification was reserved for the big baddies like Darth Vader and the anti hero like Batman. But actually, this has shifted recently, and particularly for those age seven plus, we are seeing more connections to the darkness, the weirdness and the spookiness than ever. So meme culture and other UGC as a part of play here. But also it's just that the world around us is pretty chaotic, so we want characters that reflect this chaos and weirdness, that perhaps push back against society and rebel for us, and then along the way, maybe we can learn a thing or two about how to navigate some uncomfortable situations.
So why do these matter for identification patterns? Well, identification patterns set the scene for how you want youth audiences to see and relate to your characters. They give you the foundation from which to build detail from. Especially as the world becomes increasingly global, providing avenues for instant connection can be very, very important. So we have these identification patterns. But there are also some more specific roles and behaviors that define great characters.
For those of you that are familiar with narrative development and character architects, you might notice some of these in the work of Joseph Campbell, for example, we've included just a few examples here to make this point a little bit easier to manage. Where in actual fact, there are lots and lots of character archetypes.
Archetypes refer to the role of character plays in the world and their core behaviors in light of this so interestingly, as we age from preschool, the archetypes we understand and connect with are often reflective of us and the world around us, and therefore more complex with time. For preschool ages, that's parents, it's friends and siblings, it's being brave like a superhero. And then in older skewing media, we see mentors and anti heroes and frenemies. So why does this matter?
Well, research shows that on the younger end, younger children can emotionally learn through characters, they develop new perspectives and pick up positive character strengths. And this is something that parents notice too, and they value this and look out for this as well when helping kids navigate media. So in this case, characters can play an important role in helping kids navigate the world, which in turn helps connection.
For older audiences, there's a bit of an increased appreciation for values and personalities that we want to exhibit ourselves. So whether that's being deadpan and witty like Wednesday, or honest about emotions and calling out friends for doing something wrong, and here, characters can give us the tools and encouragement to do the things that we want to do in our own lives, which again, helps connection. And so both ends of the spectrum audiences look to these archetypes to learn, to grow, to connect and help define who they are, which makes them important to consider when we consider characters ourselves.
This perhaps takes us nicely onto the second part of our session, as our fandom model identified self definition as being a core element of fandom growth, among some other things that we're going to dive into now.
How can we deepen connection by looking through the lens of our fandom model? Well, first, what is our fandom model? If you've not seen it before, or even just as a quick refresher if you have, at its heart, it's a lens that we can look through to better understand the world of fandom, and it was developed through research with 1000s of 1000s of different fans from across the world. It's made of all the things that we see important to passionate fans, and therefore, it gives us the levers that we can pull to help our audiences get there a little bit quicker and it can help us make sense of how fandoms play a role in defining who we are like. We spoke about earlier, with learning through the characters that we love, the different creative and emotional and transactional moments that we can share with a fandom or character, and how fandoms can be amplified through sharing moments with family, friends and communities.
The power of the model is that we can use it in many different contexts. So whether you just have a spark of an idea, or you want to grow your fan base, solve some tough engagement challenges that you're encountering at the moment, or just nurture relationships that are already there. And this applies across brands, audiences and industries as well. And importantly, here we can look through the lens of the fandom model to understand how we can help our characters thrive.
How do we do that then? So here I want to zoom in for this second part. Zoom in on five key areas of our fandom model, showing a couple of case studies, each of them to highlight some of the different ways character connections, maybe even through contact with youth audiences.
Let's start with our first example, friend or closeness. So this one is an element of our fandom model that most directly relates to characters, feeling like a friend of a character or personality.
A unique form of self identification. The more someone feels linked to them as a friend, the stronger their emotional connector is. Influencer fandoms or someone like Taylor Swift thrives on this.
So how do we push these friendly feelings further? The first is representation and diversity. It might seem like an obvious one, but actually, there are fewer characters and worlds out there than we actually need to get representation and diversity right. Ones that are accurate in their reflections are sufficiently nuanced and work to challenge stereotypes as well. So this includes family dynamics, for example, neurodiversity, different cultures and much more as well. Inclusion is important as it fosters both belonging and connection. Craig of the creek, pictured here is a good example of a show that gets representation and diversity right.
The next is providing a deeper look at who the characters are. So consumers and creators often don't have the time to like through core content to explore every avenue of who a character is, the quirks, their motivations, all the nuance there, or even just what they have for lunch. And peripheral content can help open up these channels of honesty and understanding. So whether that's through high production, vlog style, YouTube videos that we might see from Barbie and Unicorn Academy, or maybe even just a written short story about the character's day, or maybe a character inspired playlist to give audiences an extra glimpse of that character's personality. And as my wife tells me, when I bring it, bring her good snacks, to be known is to be loved.
The final example is, contact to bring connection to life. So which budding Marvel fan doesn't wish they can have a chat with Iron Man, for example, and contact can come to life in many different ways. For example, more traditional meet and greets, which can be particularly helpful for literary characters who don't always get seen brought to life, and particularly for younger audiences, as well to innovations using AI to help you feel like you're having a personal conversation with characters and meeting them in video games can also serve as a similar function here, or maybe it's just simply being sent a message of support through social media. It's something that Elmo managed to kick up a storm with last year by simply asking the world how everyone's doing, which prompted a lot of remote emotional responses from celebrities and more. Even small bits of contact can create meaningful feelings of friendship.
Another facet of self definition is skill development. So progress and growth are at the heart of defining who we are, and so a brand or character to help someone develop a personal skill becomes ingrained in that person's definition of self. I'm going to draw a couple of examples here from the author, Mo Williams and his character, the pigeon through both their YouTube and book content. So skill development here could involve something tangible and expressible, such as teaching kids how to draw a character or how to tell jokes, which is something that both of those things were ingrained in the character as it were designed from the start is both easy to draw and also quite chaotic and funny. But equally, it could be just as much about teaching kids about how to navigate scary moments in their lives, or providing coping strategies such as staying calm, which is increasingly important in this fast paced, high-pressured world.
There are other examples too that put both characters and a child's socio-emotional learning at the core of a brand's experience, such as Sanrio’s partnership with Kahoot to help children learn more about vocabulary and communication to Hello Kitty and Mr. Men & Little Miss, or innovation from Humie, which causes watch content to meaningfully focus on characters to support children's understanding of emotions and behaviors that these characters display.
Supporting developing children in this way right now is perhaps just as important as ever. Research from the Sesame Workshop highlights how parents now, compared to 10 years ago, describe their children as being less kind and thoughtful, whereas levels of anxiety and other less positive descriptors have actually increased. So for us, even modeling just a little bit more kindness and the characters we create might actually go a long and meaningful way.
Whilst our other examples are about self definition, our final two are focused on interaction moments, the first one being frequency. So this one's fairly straightforward in that the more you're around as a character, meaningfully anyway, the more mindshare and fandom you're able to encourage. But it also helps stronger fans get more of the character they love on a sort of top line basis. So in our own research, frequent engagement was a number one need from fans.
We're going to look at Tonieboxes here as a bit of an example, which highlights a couple of different ways in which character frequency can be pushed a little bit further. So characters and their stories were at the heart of the Toniebox experience, and it's also an experience that fits nicely into daily routines such as getting ready for school or winding down before bed. And engagement can also be relatively low effort, and kids can just sit back and take in the stories and songs and characters and worlds in a more reflective way. There's also a sense of ownership and control over the characters and stories that isn't always present in audio based content, as there's a bit more of a physicality to it, and then on that line. It also offers avenues for physical play and display for the different characters, you can collect it. You can keep them out, line them up. It keeps them front of mind. It's also a slightly new avenue to enjoy characters that perhaps before you might have only seen in visual media. And importantly, it facilitates shared moments between family members. And this in itself, can have fandom fueling benefits on its own. Particularly for kids under seven, this gives us a good bit of direction on some of the specific moments that can help characters stay connected to children more frequently.
In this final example, we'll focus on two different fandom model elements. Participation and influence. And whilst these can exist separately, we often see them come to life together.
So participation, in this instance, refers to having the creative freedom to take part in a fandom in your own unique way. And increasingly, brands are celebrating this creativity by giving fans the chance to influence and shape the fandoms that they enjoy. It turns them from just a consumer into a trusted and invested stakeholder.
From our own research, the boom in community sharing on platforms like Tiktok and Discord means fans are often looking for creative encouragement, inspiration and tools to participate in their fandom in their own way. A quarter of teens in our research wanted this. So it's not insignificant, and it's something that parents were found to really value too. And this creativity and support is very much something that characters can be a part of, for you, for audiences.
There are a couple of other examples. So author Dav Pilkey, the creator of Dog Man and Captain Underpants, has the Epic Comic Club. It's a community and a set of resources that encourages children to flex their creative muscle muscles through comic writing.
Not only is this an example of skill development, it also encourages children to use characters to create their own stories in new, personally meaningful ways. By giving kids open ended and looser questions, they have some guidance, but enough creative control to deepen their emotional investment with the characters. Comics that are uploaded to the site also have the chance to be featured for all to see. Allowing these works of art to be brought to life in a sort of a semi official capacity, giving kids some amount of influence on how the brand comes to life.
An adjacent example from the Pokemon company. So every year, they get 1000s of submissions to their competition to have a personally crafted piece of art around a character be brought to life in an official Pokemon card and competitions like this, even if it was for characters with much less heritage than Pikachu, can give a boost to audiences in feeling both valued and also inspired.
And that takes us to the end of me talking about you today, but before we get to the questions, what are some of the things that we can take away? The first one is that the key principles for making a strong character still apply. The foundation needs to be there from choosing how we want people to see our characters, the archetypes they portray, but elements like disidentification, of course, representation and modeling certain values are important and can help our audiences get more out of the characters.
The second one is building two way relationships, not just passive consumption. So here we can tap into emotional utility and provide learning opportunities for kids, as well as those feelings of being connected to characters as a friend through contact and getting a closer look into who these characters are.
Third, is encouraging and celebrating creativity with characters, so characters don't just need to be a destination, but instead they can be a partner in creativity. And giving young people the tools to do this can push connection further.
And finally, the little moments can make a big difference. So being a part of micro routines, reflecting children's worlds, helping families share moments together, they all add up and provide a little bit of extra injections of depth and frequency that can go quite a long way.
Hopefully you did manage to learn at least one thing from today, which is my main goal from the start, and also a webinar takeaway will be sent to you after this as well, so you can look back at some of these interesting things.
But for now, we are going to move on to questions. Stop Sharing. Screen sharing. Perfect.
Right? I'm now going to look at questions. So if you have any, feel free to send them through, and we can talk through some of them now.
So actually, let's start with the top one, because that's a nice, nice, easy one to lean into. What's your favourite character and why? Should have thought this. So actually, I have a couple, really. There's ones I sort of grew up with. I grew up reading the Eragon books, and they were released as I grew up. Eragon as a character goes through an amazing hero's journey, he grows and develops and changes and saves the day. And I think for me, that was something that I really connected with when I was that age. And then also on the kind of flip side with Star Wars, which I'm a big fan of, I really liked Hans Solo because he was a bit more edgy and rebellious, and so it had that element of disidentification in a way. But he also saved the day in the end as well.
Let me see,in your opinion, should a character grow and develop or stay the same? So this is an interesting one. I think it partly depends on the audience. So with younger children, you want them to have those moments of understanding and learning and moral lessons, but almost like a sitcom in a way, you do want the characters to kind of react the same as they would in series one and series two. If put into similar situations, you want them to always have those learning opportunities. So if they change too much, particularly with preschool content, you know that's not necessarily something that's going to be conducive to that type of content, but in team focused media, something that has a linear story that progresses. People do want to see characters change and grow and develop, and particularly those that are kind of a bit more effective to you as well. You want to see that bit of personal development and change as a story goes on.
How does parents affinity for any characters or brands play a part in developing fandom? I think they absolutely massively can. So with, I think, something like Bluey as well. There's obviously an example that lots of people are going to draw from. A lot of the affinity that families have for the content, I think, is probably driven by parents more than anything, because they have a stronger connection with that depiction of family life and the small struggles. And
you know how play comes to life. I think for kids, in most cases, it's bright and it's colorful, and they see kids playing essentially, but we see a lot of parents actually driving engagement with those brands as well. So when you're thinking of an audience that might watch with their family, absolutely there needs to be that level of identification there for those as well. And with teens, I gave you Wednesday as an example there. I think that was particularly well received because parents who grew up with the older TV shows and films for Wednesday had a bit of identification there, and they were able to share something team focused, which they usually wouldn't.
What's the most common mistake you see clients that come to you for help? I think in some cases, it could be a lack of direction or clarity, maybe. So the reason that we have those five stages that we work through is so you don't trip yourself up, and you're not inconsistent, and you're not clear with how you want the audience to see the character. So making sure that there's that clear identification pattern. How do we want a child to relate to this? How we want them to see them like themselves. And then making sure that the archetypes are reflective of those that they can understand and the world around them, something that we didn't necessarily speak about was aesthetics as well. And there's no one answer for aesthetics, because it needs to be linked to the brand and the story and the world that you're creating as well. But some things, particularly for younger audiences, need to be sort of clear play patterns, for example, and props that help facilitate play and clear signifiers of their role behavior. For an example of this, you can tell by looking at the characters exactly who they're going to be and what they're going to do, and with teens as well, things like they look for characters for fashion influence as well, for example.
Can you talk a bit about developing character through audio experiences, but visuals are not available?
That is very interesting. I think maybe it's even more important through audio to have really distinct things that each of the characters do, obviously the voice themselves. And if you have characters that sound very similar, it's going to be hard, obviously, for the children to differentiate who they are. And then also, I think, having very clear things that they do that can be brought to life through audio. So for example, if you know they are all musical, make sure that one of them plays the drums and the other one's guitar, and it's really clear that when one's doing one you know exactly who it is. I also think things like additional sounds as well. So it's not just voice. Audio can be particularly important in helping them come to life. I think there'll always be a bit of a depiction of the characters and who they are, and even something supplementary that whether it's a YouTube video or a bit of written media, for example, that comes with these audio products to try and help them understand a bit more about who these characters are,
So what is the biggest challenge preschool brands face today with regards to unleashing their fandom. That is an interesting one as well. I think it's sometimes it is that kind of lack of frequency and always on like particularly with preschool, you can't have really big emotional hits like you can as an adult, where you have one TV series and you wait three years till the next one comes out, and you still have a pretty good fandom for it. You need to stay front of mind with them, and you need to make sure that you do have a part to play in daily routines, and there's enough experiences that are meaningful but frequent and kind of differentiate themselves as well, and even if It's a case of being always on on YouTube or encouraging creativity, I think you need to kind of come at it in a few different ways and make sure you're staying front of mind.
Where can I learn more about your fandom model? Well, actually, we can send a copy of our fandom booklet along with this webinar as well, actually to everyone afterwards, and it'll give you some examples like we discussed today across all the different fandom areas to help you learn how you can navigate this kind of stuff as well.
So two more minutes. You touched on video game characters briefly. Does fandom work differently for video game characters? I was thinking about this yesterday. I think that video game characters are interesting, and the same principles apply whether you're making a character for a video game or a TV show. But actually something else at play with video game characters is the agency that children or adult players have with the character. So in part, the character becomes how you play as them. So with Minecraft, Steve, he might be seen by one child as resourceful and a bit of a problem solver and really badass at beating up skeletons. But then for someone else, he might be a creative and a pacifist. So it can be hard to bring them to life in other media when people don't have that consistent view. But then I think it's a case of focusing on those things that everyone does know and connect with as well.
Do you think mascots can have fandom built around them in a similar way to characters? I think absolutely, they definitely can, and I suppose in most cases they don't necessarily have the same level of supporting media, but I think that's where things can be boosted by having additional things that show the personalities of these mascots. I think obviously shining through quite distinct team and brand values can be quite important as well to help them come out. And I think contact is obviously quite important, giving kids a chance to actually meet them physically and learn more about them.
They're all incredible questions, and we're at the very end of our webinar now. So thank you very much. And I hope you learned one thing, and maybe even a bit extra, then I'll be even happier. And we hope you join us for the next one.
Or if you want to just sit back and listen, you can watch this and all of our other webinars here
