Character licensing, an industry worth $389.8 billion and run for most of the last century by large American men in large American boardrooms, was invented by an Englishwoman with a sketchbook and a sewing needle. This is the story of Beatrix Potter, the author behind The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Nobody wanted the book Six publishers turned it down. Not because it was bad, but because it was small. They wanted a big book, because a big book could carry a big price. Potter wanted the opposite: something a child could hold in one hand and buy with pocket money. “Little rabbits cannot afford to spend 6 shillings on one book,” she said, which in today’s money is about £48 for a picture book, and she had a point. So in December 1901 she took her savings, printed 250 copies herself, and handed them round to family and friends. They vanished. Publisher Frederick Warne & Co saw them selling, changed its mind, and took the book on at a shilling a copy, roughly £8 today. Within a year they had sold 20,000. The Tale of Peter Rabbit has since sold around 45 million copies in 36 languages, which makes it one of the best-selling books in the history of books. That in itself is a nice story about persistence. It is not why I wanted to write this post. The doll that changed everything In 1903, two years after paying her own printing bill, Potter sat down and sewed a Peter Rabbit doll for the niece of her editor. Then she did something genuinely strange for the time. She took it to the Patent Office and registered it. That doll is, as far as anyone can establish, the oldest licensed character in the world. Mickey Mouse would not exist for another quarter of a century! Potter did not stop at the doll. Next came a board game, wallpaper, slippers, tea sets, painting books and a Peter Rabbit calendar. Every single one went past her desk. She investigated the manufacturers herself, rejected the ones she did not trust, and insisted, with some patriotic firmness, that the doll be made in England. She understood something most brands still get wrong. A licence is not a drawing you rent out for a fee. It is your reputation, handed to a stranger to look after, and you get it back in whatever condition they leave it in. Why characters work, in numbers System1 ran more than 300 campaigns from the IPA Effectiveness Databank through the numbers, dating back to 1992, sorting them by whether or not they were built around a recurring character. Campaigns with one were 37% more likely to grow market share and 30% more likely to grow profit. Orlando Wood’s explanation, in his book Lemon, is that characters speak to the right hemisphere. They have faces, agency and little narratives, and the brain is built to remember exactly that sort of thing while remaining entirely indifferent to a rectangle in your brand colours. One interesting finding and top tip if you’re reading this far. The tactic is being abandoned. Character use among IPA Effectiveness Award entries has fallen from 41% of submissions in 1992 to around 12%. It’s a proven advantage that fewer and fewer people are bothering to use. This insight is a gift, use it while you still can. Act like a custodian, not an owner The rabbit money went into farmland. Potter bought Hill Top Farm in the Lake District and became Mrs Heelis, a prize-winning breeder of Herdwick sheep. Then she gave it all away: fourteen farms and 4,000 acres to the National Trust, so a great deal of England’s most photographed landscape was, in effect, bought by a fictional rabbit with a poor attitude to trespassing. Peter is still earning, 123 years after that patent, because nobody in the chain cashed him in. Brand equity compounds over decades. However, in today’s world, most CMO’s tenure is 3.5 years and so that is the timeline they are judged on. So every incentive tends to be short-term and often quietly destroys the brand. You cannot fix your own tenure, but you can change the question you ask yourself. Ask not “what targets did I hit this year”, but “is my successor inheriting something stronger, or something spent”. It’s the question Potter was effectively asking every time she turned down a manufacturer. Some practical takeaways for you Know who you’re really making it for. The publishers optimised for their own margin. Potter optimised for a five-year-old. Cheap is not the lesson, because premium is often the smarter signal. Knowing exactly whose life the thing lands in, and designing every decision around that person, is. Give your brand a character, not just a logo. See the numbers above. Then notice how few of your competitors have bothered. Say no like Beatrix. Every partnership, collab and line extension either builds your brand or spends it. Potter checked each one personally and turned down the ones that cheapened Peter. Almost nobody does this any more, which is precisely why so many brands feel thin. The shameless self-promotion bit If you want to learn more about how to build incredible brands that stand the test of time, our Brand Building mini MBA course goes considerably deeper into how to practically build and grow great brands. It’s made with Keith Weed, Josy Paul, Nils Leonard and other Cannes Lions award-winning practitioners, so you’ll learn the secret sauce from the people who do the job day in day out. p.s. Think of three brand characters you loved as a child. You can likely still picture all three and feel what each one stood for. That’s the power of brand characters.