An unfortunate truth is that many kids’ breakfast food choices are based on the appeal of cartoon rabbits, toucans and elephants touting sugary cereals.

But we grow out of that kind of consumerism, right?

Similar marketing seems to be working well on grown men and women. Advertising the solutions to solve some of the human body’s most repulsive maladies now is done with the help of comical animated characters.

Digger, the sharp-clawed enemy of toe nails, spread faster than athlete’s foot when introduced by Novartis as the cartoon personification of its Lamisil brand. I am sure Digger’s face is being used as an avatar by more than a few teens.

Reckitt Benckiser Inc.’s over-the-counter line of expectorants, Mucinex, has a whole family of green phlegm characters to illustrate how fast a booger can move when the right medicine arrives on the scene.

Outside of pharma, the Düsseldorf, Germany, office of BBDO recently introduced a tiny blue cartoon being, in the form of a single calorie, for PepsiCo’s Pepsi Max diet cola. Print ads were posted on the European ad-gallery site adgoodness.com, prompting plenty of controversy over the fact that the calorie commits suicide because it’s lonely. AdAge has since written on the campaign and subsequent outcry from those arguing the issue of suicide is sacrosanct.

I recall one B2B company in the investor relations industry that successfully linked its brand to a cartoonist’s creation. an online database of fund managers and other financial industry contacts, used the image of a baby, dressed in a top hat, throwing around cash. At one memorable conference for the National Investor Relations Institute, Big Dough startled more than a few of normally staid IR officers when it employed a Disneyesque costumed character – a seven-foot-tall baby – to walk around the exhibition hall. Whether the non-traditional marketing approached helped I don’t know, but Big Dough captured plenty of market share among corporate users before being rebranded as part of a larger suite of Ipreo’s services.

I’m guessing we don’t see more B2B businesses tied to fictional characters or cartoon imagery because so much of an organization’s success rides on the credibility and message of the CEO. Marketing officers at B2B firms spend their time making sure the CEO succeeds as chief storyteller and cheerleader for the brand and its heritage.

But given the global crisis of confidence regarding the integrity of executives leading businesses of all sizes, I can’t actually see the downside of making a B2B firm’s CEO sharing the limelight with someone a bit more believable and, yes, fun.  The “Why is Dora Crying?” ad in major newspapers last week was a damn effective way for Viacom to pressure Time Warner to cut a better deal to keep Nick Jr. on its cable systems.

Granted, most specialty chemical companies, makers of superconductors and developers of enterprise accounting software do not have the corporate culture or desire to support borrowing from the consumer marketing toolbox.

But many of the customers and employees of those same conservative organizations privately cheer for the underdog breakout firms who occasionally pop onto the scene and take our breath away because they refuse to conform to conventional wisdom.

Assuming we ever get the steel industry going again in the United States, I’d love to see a fire-breathing dragon conduct the quarterly results conference call.