For the first time, Razer is relying on anime girl mascots to sell products. Here’s why.

Razer has anime girl mascots now, designed especially to promote the brand’s Adaro lifestyle headphones. There are four of them, one for each headphone model, each with their own hairstyle and colors. They’re collectively known as the Razer Adaro Girls, and individually as Yui, Riko, Hina, and Honoka.

Born out of a simple partnership with Tokyo-based illustrator LunaticJoker, the Razer Adaro Girls were originally meant to be just for the Japanese market. Then, Razer realized that hey, lots of other countries are interested in anime as well. And so the girls left the land of the rising sun, and are now plastered on the brand’s official site.

It’s the first time Razer is using any sort of mascot. The gaming lifestyle brand has always been typified by its cult products and signature green and black colors. Gamers around the globe worship Razer as a “gamer brand”, one that, if used by an individual, immediately helps identify him or her as a gamer. Razer has never needed a mascot; its three-headed snake logo is probably the closest it has to one.

But perhaps it’s finally realizing that you can’t just rely on a cult of personality to break into certain markets.

(See: Razer CEO reveals secret to his company’s success: hyper-focus)

In Japan, everything is typified by mascots. Restaurants have mascots. Real estate agencies have mascots. Entire prefectures have mascots. Everyday food items like a fried egg and a piece of salmon get turned into mascots. It makes sense that a brand looking to break into the Japanese market should use a mascot to help its target audience identify with it.

In fact, that’s exactly what Belarusian developer Wargaming.net did when trying to penetrate the (at that time) brand new Japanese market with its MMO World of Tanks. Wargaming teamed up with the popular Japanese tank-centric anime Girls Und Panzer to create character voice packs that could be used with its game. It also changed its browser tutorials into manga-style ones, featuring the same characters in the voice packs. While Girls Und Panzer wasn’t actually a Wargaming branded mascot, its characters helped humanized the military game, which, for the uninformed, only features tanks, mud, sand, shelled-out cities, and more tanks.

Geraldine Yong, CEO and co-founder of digital sticker distribution platform PicoCandy, tells us that having a good mascot can help build brand awareness and affiliation, depending on the nature of a business and its customers. PicoCandy creates and distributes stickers for clients, and it’s familiar with mascots as a marketing tool.

“For a consumer product, having a mascot is very important.”