The Effects on the Popularities and Interests Mascot Characters´ Acceptability Give to the General Public

The conventional studies on mascot characters were evaluated subjectively. In this study not only subjective evaluations using the SD method but also objective ones with biomedical signals and response time were performed for the evaluations of the mascot characters. The result of tests and researches showed that there was a correlation between brain wave event related potential and response time for the character cognitions and, mascots\´ acceptability also played a major role to their popularities besides "cuteness" and "weirdness". Under these results, local governments\´ mascots were picked up respectively and a research was conducted on what kind of effects they made for attracting interest to local governments, which led to the conclusion that the local governments, featuring mascots with distinctive and understandable motives in order to explain their products and cultures, succeeded in getting more interests than the ones with undistinguished and weak characters.