Sometimes you need more than a marketing message to push a particular brand—and that’s where emoji can come in.
The imagery, which has been popular on Twitter over the past couple of years—with brands like UFC and Star Wars taking full advantage—is starting to take off more with companies, as more and more are introducing personalized versions of it to draw in fans.
Earlier this year, 20th Century Fox worked with Snaps Media to produce a series of emoji based on the hit comic book film Deadpool, making it a top draw with fans. (The film went on to generate over $700 million at the box office off of just a $58 million budget.)
Now, more brands are getting into the swing of things. Following the release of her hit mobile game Kim Kardashian: Hollywood (produced in conjunction with Glu Mobile), the mega media mogul launched her line of Kimoji in December, charging $1.99 for a series of personalized emoji featuring a number of Kim’s expressions.
As a result, it’s become one of the best-selling celebrity emoji-based apps on the market. Quartz noted, “Kimoji’s success can be attributed to disparate factors. Firstly, it’s a keyboard app, which means it can be universally access from within any iPhone application that requires text input. Secondly, the Kimoji app is still quite fiddly because it’s a keyboard app. Users have to activate it in their phone’s settings before it’s available. By contrast, a version of Kimoji released as a native sticker app for iMessage would be frictionless.”
This week, Disney wants a bigger piece of the emoji picture. Not content with just dominating Twitter with Star Wars imagery last year (starting with the Star Wars Celebration event and leading through the release of The Force Awakens in theaters), the company has released the new game Disney Emoji Bliss, a match-three effort that comes with a plethora of emoji characters, based on its most popular properties, including Alice In Wonderland, The Little Mermaid and Monsters Inc.
“Collect and play with hundreds of Disney and Pixar emoji like never before in an exciting matching game! Play fast-paced rounds of match-3 to earn prizes, complete missions, and discover new emoji,” the company noted in a press release.
The game encourages players to keep matching up and unlocking emoji, which can be used in text conversations for iOS and Android.
Between these three properties alone, licensed emoji have really come a long way over the past couple of years. And with Facebook expanding Messenger features with more emoji selections (including general expressions and licensed characters from Elf, Inside Out and Angry Birds) and Twitter introducing a customizable emoji-like sticker system to liven up photos posted to the social page, there’s no sign of the emoji trend slowing down.
