P.G.Wodehouse’s character Jeeves has long been a byword for the ultimate right-hand man, especially in the British psyche. If you have a Jeeves, then you have it all.

The search engine ‘Ask Jeeves’ capitalised on this widely held understanding from its launch in 1996, until a company buyout in 2005 resulted in the character being axed. 4 years later and the affable servant has made his return after market research determined that in the UK, ‘Ask Jeeves’ still has a brand awareness of 83%, compared to Ask.com’s 72%. This just goes to show that if you can open the right drawers in the minds of consumers, you can create a brand that runs far deeper than an attractive yet baseless word mark. Perhaps it plays to those of us who are useless with names but remember faces.

However, even when armed with this new insight, the visual re-tooling of the character fails to capture the spirit of the idea in the same way as his predecessor. With his new grey suit and 3D rendering, Jeeves now appears far more like a banker than a butler. So the mascot has been brought back, but the character has been lost – one would have imagined that Ask might have had a bit more respect for the original’s value given their recall findings.