Planning to kill your mascot? Consider the following

Sometimes, you have to kill your darlings—and, apparently, your mascots.

In 2020, the snack-food company Planters announced that its mascot, Mr. Peanut, was dead. The stunt, eventually revealed to be part of a Super Bowl campaign in which Baby Nut was born, quickly prompted brands like Mr. Clean and Snickers to jump in on the public mourning.

Five years later, it’s déjà vu all over again, this time with the victims being Duolingo’s mascot, Duo the Owl, and his friends Falstaff, Zari, and Lily. The language-learning app announced Duo’s death on February 11 and followed it up with vague posts that encouraged mourning and speculation about what killed the mascots (a Cybertruck, in Duo’s case) and what would bring them back (users completing language-learning lessons on the app). Once again, brands including Scrub Daddy, Byoma, and Tarte were quick to join in with their own posts and comments responding to the death of the owl. Even Dua Lipa sent her condolences. Two weeks later, Duolingo revived the bird with a video stating, “Legends never die.”

When it comes to engagement, the stunt seems to have paid off: According to ad management platform Metricool, Duolingo’s engagement across platforms increased 346% in the days after its initial post, with a 52% engagement rate on the Instagram announcement alone.

But not everyone was amused, and certain aspects of the campaign have raised questions about shock value marketing and how far is too far. Given the high amount of brand participation in the campaign, experts told us they expect to see other marketers take inspiration from Duo’s death, for better or worse—so what should they consider before throwing their main character under the bus (or truck)?

Know your audience

What qualifies as brand-safe marketing in 2025 seems to be up for debate as some brands crawl back to X and continue spending on Meta platforms that are dialing back content moderation. When it comes to touching on a topic as sensitive as death, experts told us it’s still a tricky subject—one that requires a certain brand personality and audience to pull off.

“It was a huge risk in some ways, but I think [Duolingo] clearly [knows] their audience, and their audience has jumped on board,” Richard Hanna, associate professor of marketing at Babson College, told us. “I don’t know that another brand could simply follow and repeat this formula to the same success.”

Alex Caceres, Metricool’s head of US marketing, agreed: “Other brands might struggle to make a stunt like this feel authentic,” she said in an email. “A poorly executed attempt could come across as try-hard or turn off audiences.”

Duolingo’s signature sense of humor was front-and-center throughout the campaign. In one video where the brand promoted mascot plushies with X-ed out eyes in coffin-shaped boxes for $29.95, a voiceover reads, “We’re monetizing grief because we are a corporation!” Another video, displaying Duo in a casket set to a sexually explicit song, garnered more than 7 million likes on TikTok.

Hanna said Planters’s death stunt didn’t seem to land as well as Duolingo’s, which he chalked up to bad timing (Mr. Peanut’s demise unfortunately coincided with the death of Kobe Bryant) and also because there simply may not have been as much emotional attachment to Mr. Peanut to begin with.

“This [success] doesn’t happen for most mascots,” he said. “They’re not part of a bigger conversation in pop culture the way the Duo the Owl is.”

Don’t take it too far

Still, a cheeky brand like Duolingo isn’t immune to backlash, as past events have shown, and some marketers have taken issue with certain aspects of the campaign. One video, where the “dead” mascots appear as a viral audio of a woman singing “I tried not to kill myself” plays, could be seen as making light of suicide, digital strategist Benton Williams argued in the internet culture newsletter, Silence, Brand.

In 2007, GM changed an ad about a robot throwing itself off a bridge after a suicide-prevention group asked the brand to pull the creative. In the case of Duo, though, that doesn’t seem to be the case, as Benton noted many marketing leaders opted to “keep their cards closer to their chests on this one.”

“I truly believe that people would see through this if it was another brand,” Williams told us. “But because Duolingo is a leader for both community and culture at large, as well as an industry leader, there’s this weird gray area of immunity.”

In the original announcement, Duolingo also encouraged people to share their credit-card numbers in mourning of Duo, which Hanna said “could easily come back to bite them” if someone took it seriously. Even the video of Duo getting hit by the Tesla could be received poorly, especially among consumers unfamiliar with Duolingo’s sense of humor, he said.

Williams emphasized that brands exercise caution if they look to replicate or draw inspiration from the stunt.

“Do not settle for virality over meaningful engagement, know where your line is, and be able to maintain that in the face of being asked to make something go viral or increase the bottom line,” he said.

Make the “death” mean something

All in all, it took a couple weeks for Duolingo to bring Duo back to life, which could have been a titch too long. Hanna said keeping audiences involved in the process of reviving Duo seemed to work in Duolingo’s favor because it kept them invested—but dragging things out could work against a brand, since without clear direction, people can easily tire of such a stunt. Some felt that way before it became clear that completing Duolingo lessons would save Duo; Williams said he felt bored and confused by Duolingo’s overall goal one week in.

Caceres, who said she “loved the campaign,” agreed. “It did take some time for the main messaging of the campaign to get back to me past the humor and online discourse,” she said.

Mascot deaths and revivals can also cause some confusion: Planters revived its mascot in 2021 after a yearlong effort to replace him with Baby Nut, who then grew up to be Peanut Jr., a transformation that might have been hard to follow for those not paying close attention.

With Duo the Owl now alive and presumably well, it’s unlikely that the brand will pull off a stunt like this again, Hanna said—at least not with the same level of success.

“You can do big events on an annual basis,” he said. “But you can only kill the mascot once.”