Concept of Character Merchandising

The 21st century has observed the mass media outbreak as a supplier of information and a resourceful marketing tool. Be it by print, audio, visual, or web means, markets are flooded with commercial advertisements of merchandise. Character merchandising has emerged as a significant tool for marketing and other commercial purposes to promote sales. This chapter offers a conceptual and theoretical framework of character merchandising. It presents a historical overview of the practice of character merchandising and personality merchandising. It examines the kinds of characters and their legal rights, viz. property rights, personality rights, and publicity rights. Ownership of these rights depends upon the nature of the character, that is, in the case of a real character, the person himself is the owner of rights, while in the case of fictional or graphical characters, the owner is the original creator of the character. It also addresses the moral and economic justifications, for recognizing the rights of characters. The moral justifications comprising the Lockean property and Hegel’s personality rationales, while the economic justifications comprising the incentivization and allocative-efficiency rationales have been discussed at length.