What can humour do for your brand?
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”: opined Maya Angelou, American poet and civil rights activist.
Or in other words, customers won’t remember your product USP, feature or benefit, but will remember how your brand made them feel.
Humour plays a serious role in the fight for our feelings. But amidst the cheeky one-liners, edgy ad campaigns and casual messaging of consumer brands, humour should not be seen as a hack for attention. It should be handled as a weapon and deployed with care.
Here’s four benefits that humour, when deployed strategically, can benefit your brand.
1. Build trust. Sigmund Freud came up with the Relief Theory. A concept based on the principle that laughter relieves ‘nervous energy’, arguably relieving the natural suspicion around offers. Humour can serve as a powerful mechanism to break the ice and broaden real relationships between people and products.
2. Keep it real. Humour is innately human. One challenge for many scaleups is speaking humanly when the temptation is to talk tech. After all, ‘approachable is the new aspirational’.
3. Take a position. Strong positioning is as simple as attracting the right people and repelling the people who don’t belong. A great example of this is what the Economist did with a pair of pants. If this tickled you, the Economist is for you. If it didn’t, it isn’t. Simple.
4. Stay front of mind. “It’s like milk, but made for humans”. No doubt Oatly’srecent ad campaign deliberately set out to cause uproar, not least amongst Swedish milk farmers. The ad was packed full of virality as it served as a funny story that could be shared with friends, ensuring it was part of the conversation and top of mind.
To summarise, lols done right can be lucrative, just as humour mishandled be damaging. The difference often comes down to whether humour is seen as a strategy or a tactic. Whether it’s baked into the long term personality and positioning of your brand, or used as a short term cry for attention.
Play with care.
