Campbell's Kids

The Campbell Kids are the advertising cartoon mascot of the Campbell Soup Company. Drawn by Grace Drayton in 1904, the characters became popular almost immediately, leading to the production of dolls, cookbooks, cards, plates, T-shirts, and many other items fashioned in their likeness. The Campbell Kids have spanned many generations and still represent the Campbell Soup Company today.

History

By 1904, Campbell realized they needed a character that would extol the virtues of Campbell soup. Grace Drayton, a freelance illustrator of children’s book and comic strips, was known for her chubby figures with round faces, wide-set eyes, and a pug nose.[1] The artist modeled her characters after herself as she once stated in a newspaper interview in 1926, “I was much interested in my looks. I knew I was funny [looking].”[2] The Campbell executives were delighted with her “round and jolly toddlers,” and thus the Campbell Kids were born.[2]

These plump toddlers represented the era’s perception of health and wholesomeness. The public was introduced to them through streetcar advertisements beginning in 1905.[3] Each ad featured a jingle at the top, a red-and-white can on the right, and a Campbell Kid on the left (Fig 4 and 5). Public reaction to the Kids was almost immediate. Requests for copies of the ads inundated the company, and it only charged customers fifteen cents to cover postage.[4] These kinds of requests lasted for decades, demonstrating the continual popularity of the Campbell Kids (Fig 6). Mothers hung images of the Kids on nursery walls, and teachers placed them in classrooms.[4]

In the same year, the Campbell company made its first appearance in magazine advertisements in Ladies’ Home Journal and later Good Housekeeping, and by 1909 it made its newspaper debut in the Saturday Evening Post.[2] The Campbell Kids featured prominently in these ads as Campbell adopted the tots as the company emblems. The Campbell Kid imagery became so popular that they animated postcards, bridge tallies, place cards, and lapel pins.[3] The use of jingles and familiar characters were common in the early twentieth century. Company characters were cross-marketed with other objects in order to spread brand recognition.

Targeting consumers

The Kids were attractive to children, but they also promoted prevailing societal ideologies as well, mirroring what adult consumers wanted to see in themselves. The early twentieth century saw the birth of modern America and her “relentless faith in progress and can-do spirit.”[2] The Campbell Kids fit well into this framework as they espoused a message of optimism in progress and loyalty to brand and country.[4] Advertising professionals claimed to contribute to progress by guiding consumers to wise product selection. These businesspeople saw themselves as agents of change through material production, and therefore, cultural progress.[5] Advertisers identified women as the primary consumer of many products, so ads often depicted how women could use the advertised technologies to improve their families according to progressive bourgeois values.[5] An important value within the progressive framework was health which resulted in an increasing importance in the purity and nutritional value of food.

Dolls

Campbell’s soup offered an avenue for the consumption of an American product, and in 1909 the company had a new product on the market: the Campbell Kid doll. The first Campbell Kid doll was a stuffed velvet character, but the more well-known dolls emerged in 1910, made by the E. I. Horsman company. The dolls were very popular, and by 1912, thousands were sold through Sears, Roebuck and Co. and Montgomery Ward catalogs.[2] The Campbell Kid dolls came in a variety of sizes (eleven to sixteen inches in height), styles (little Dutch girl and boy, petite, peekaboo), and compositions (cloth, bisque, and composite material).[3] The Dutch Campbell Kid was first advertised in the 1914 Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog. The dolls were available throughout the teens and into the forties as premiums and purchased goods.[9] The consumer market of the early twentieth century incorporated the transformed toy trade into its marketing strategies. Toys and dolls became “name branded” in order to promote brand recognition. The Campbell Kid dolls are the epitome of the partnership between food product and toy product. The healthy, happy Campbell Kids that promoted the purity and nutritional value of their product took the form of doll, and parents gave them to their children. Because children were serving the psychological needs rather than the economic needs of adults by the twentieth century, cherished as emotional assets and bringing love into the family, parents showed their affection through “the number and cost of toys they gave to their children."

Evolution

Over time, the Campbell Kids changed in order to keep up with new cultural attitudes and changing standards of physical well-being. In the 1920s, Campbell girls donned flapper dresses and danced the Charleston. Other Campbell Kids were depicted talking on the telephone, flying airplanes, riding construction cranes, and visiting Egypt. These images reflected the increasingly ubiquitous telephone, Lindbergh’s famous transatlantic journey, the rise of skyscraper, and the discovery of King Tut’s tomb.[2] The Campbell Kids were no longer in every Campbell advertisement.

In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, advertisers determined that the Campbell Kids were ill-suited for the sober economic times. However, advertisers introduced the slogan “M’m! M’m! Good!” and Campbell Kid voices were on the radio shows like Amos n’ Andy. In advertisements, the Kids were dressed as policemen, utility workers, circus trainers, drummer boys, and other roles in service and entertainment.[2]

In the 1940s, during World War II, newsprint and tin rationing resulted in cuts in both advertising and soup production, so the Campbell Kids were not as visible as in past years. When they were depicted, they were engaged in wartime production as war bond salesmen and air raid wardens. In 1944, the Campbell Soup Company received an achievement award from the U.S. Department of War for its contributions to the war effort.[2]