Psychiatric advice from a Peanuts character may cost a nickel, but life advice is free, courtesy of the folks at MetLife. The insurance company has dozens of 24-page booklets available for reading at their website, illustrated with ten or so Peanuts images apiece. You can even call and request that they send you printed copies, although, alas, a limit of three booklets per collector… er, I mean potential customer. So I’m sitting here with information on Disaster Preparation, Estate Planning, and Life Insurance.

If you explore the website, you’ll see that while most topics have PDF downloads for the booklets, some just have informative text on the website. Alas, that means that we don’t get to see what Peanuts image they would generate for the topics Getting Married and Divorce.

However, the covers to booklets like Parenting, When Your Child Gets A Drivers License, and Planning for Your Child or Other Dependent With Special Needs do suggest that they see the Snoopy/Woodstock relationship as a parent/child one. I guess responsibility comes with size.

I’ve always found the Metlife/Peanuts relationship to be interesting. This is quite a long-running endorsement deal for a brand that doesn’t have a clear and specific relationship to the product – there’s nothing inherent about Peanuts that screams “insurance!”, but clearly at this point it is far more than a campaign. With extensive use of Peanuts for literally decades now, its clear that Snoopy and friends are now substantial parts of the public identity of this company that dates back to the 19th century. (And yet the converse is not true – when we see Snoopy, we do not automatically think “MetLife!”)

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