Have any of you found any significant positive results from investing in getting a mascot designed to represent your company or designed a good one yourself? Also, if you've gotten one designed, what's a fair price to pay?

I have not had a mascot designed and the reason why is, I think they are silly. Let's say I am a business owner and I come to your website. You have a mascot of goofy. What conclusion do I come up with? If i didn't know Host Gator was huge and people behind the scenes. I would come to their site, see the big gator and leave.

Their are a few that come to mind .. HostGator, FatCow and SingleHop. Of those I think SingleHop did a great job at marketing their mascot, and integrating it so it flows with their site. Most prospects searching for information on web hosting are not developers. They're small mom and pop businesses or aspiring entrepreneurs. I'm particularly impressed with SingleHop's site. You can tell a lot of work went into designing that site - to convert prospects into clients.

What I like on singlehop is that they don't have their frog on the main page of their site, it's only on some of their internal pages (at least that's how it was).

I think for many, it's hard enough being a small shop and trying to do namebranding on the logo and colors etc. Bringing in ANOTHER branding item that you have to dump more money into is usually not something that small shops do.

Do mascots help? I'm sure they do for larger companies or they wouldn't have them

We just had someone that we wanted to test out for an add to our designers team (we have about a dozen that we always keep on hand, but we like to add when we come across a good one). He redid one of our sites and I loved it all, but the logo/mascot he came up with, and its not his fault, but I am really thinking of ditching it and either going without one, or finding something that fits.

I think the biggest thing is the "finding something that fits", I know its my issue right now.

I hadn't considered the additional branding factor as it's indeed more weight on your shoulders in terms of marketing but assuming it helped reel in customers I'd imagine that the costs would be hopefully justified although it's true what you said about it being more of a risk for a smaller company. As for them being silly, it probably would be a bad idea to have some ridiculous character to misrepresent your business but say you had a name like FrogHost, a frog mascot would not be silly in that scenario assuming it didn't look like a Disney cartoon so it would feel more essential in that case in my opinion.

I'm not trying to be mean, but I would never give my company a name like that. You limit yourself of looking unprofessional and childish. When you have names like that, people receive a potiential false perception. It costs millions of dolars over 10+ years to get Host Gator to not look like a joke. If you have the money to do it, go for it. but your name and brand is the difference between success and failure.

Mascots can be beneficial. Look at Geico. For decades they've used the Gecko as their mascot, and it's hard to think of Geico without thinking of the Gecko, the "It's so easy a caveman can do it" branding or the "who's watching you" and the two eyes on the money.

Millions are spent to brand this into your brain, and it works!

Cartoon characters apeal to a certain demographic, it just all depends if you want to limit yourself to that demographic. This is why you'll find many hosting companies set up multiple websites with different targets in mind.

And I'm with Zachary on the make or break issue. The wrong name can send the wrong message, but with enough money you can USUALLY turn a brand.

I think mascots are goofy. We are moving away from logos into mascots? Is that another Web 2.0 element, LoL.

I think they work too. They may seem silly, but guess what you are talking about them and you know the company's name. You don't want them to be so over the top that they distract from what you are trying to sell, but like handsonhosting said, that company gets inside of your head whether you like it or not.