Does a major brand drop its icon over political correctness?

The Aflac duck has been silenced. For now. Gilbert Gottfried has been let go as the voice of the voice of the Aflac brand Identity. While it is understandable why Aflac would drop Gottfried, and some may say it is just as hard to understand why they hired him in 2000. But that is not what I am getting at here. Gottfried decided to make a few tasteless jokes at the expense of the Japanese people and the recent disaster that they are suffering via his Twitter account, and Aflac felt that any continued association with him was un-sustainable in the name of brand management, public relations, and arguably; good taste.

Aflac does 70% of its business in Japan. It is reasonable that they would need to distance themselves from Gottfried. The question is how quickly did they come up with that decision? I am sure that an official corporate news release would say that it was not a hard decision, but the idea had to cause some serious corporate soul-searching. The Gottfried duck is a decade old identity. The duck appears in print but its main delivery mechanism was television and that medium directly associated the duck and the voice that they chose to accompany the visual.

Aflac has millions upon millions invested in building that duck into an instantly recognizable identity. It is a simple rendering of the animal and the commercials are a long running media tradition of sorts. You don't even have to watch the commercials. All that you have to do is hear it and know who it belongs to. I can't think of any other brand that can do that right now.

Aflac has initiated an open casting call to replace Gottfried as the voice of the duck, but it might be best to just move on to something else. Replacing a well known character, or even the voice of, for any reason has not been the best choice in the past. Just ask the Looney Tunes franchise when Mel Blanc died.