Originally published by Colin Shaw on LinkedIn: Discover a Key to Successful Advertising
Do you use humor to get over your message? Some brands are particularly good at it. If it’s done well, a funny tone of voice can make a brand more memorable and attract a big following.
A recent blog cites Old Spice as an example of a big brand that uses humor effectively, in its “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” ad campaign.
Old Spice realized that women are often the ones who do the household shopping, and that includes buying men’s toiletry products. So it came up with a series of commercials in which a hunky guy steps comically from one set to another.
Heinz used a different kind of humor to promote its ketchup products during the 2016 Super Bowl. It’s hard not to chuckle at these weiner dogs stampeding toward their favorite condiment.
After watching a few of these ads, even I am ready to go out and buy their products!
Humor builds a brand by creating positive emotions. People come back for a second helping of those good feelings and share them with their friends. Those same positive emotions are the building blocks for an improved customer experience.
We at Beyond Philosophy spent over two years conducting research with the London Business School to develop the world’s largest database of customer emotions and touchpoints, which we call the “Emotional Signature” database. We use this Emotional Signature when we analyze a company’s level of emotional engagement with its customers and develop a strategy to increase that engagement. And sometimes, that strategy involves humor.
Humor Doesn’t Always Work
Using humor as a branding and customer experience strategy can be tricky.
To begin with, you must actually be funny. Have you ever been at a party and heard someone tell a joke that just didn’t work? You cringed, right? And you probably felt a little embarrassed for the person. You don’t want those sorts of feel-bad emotions associated with your customer experience.
You also must be careful not to offend the very customers you’re trying to reach.
Several years ago, Abercrombie and Fitch launched a line of t-shirts that it thought would be a big hit with its young Asian customers. But the t-shirts featured Asian caricatures that looked like something out of an old Jerry Lewis movie, with slogans like “Eat In or Wok Out.” Asian students saw the shirts as a racial slur and Abercrombie quickly pulled them from its shelves.
When social media was buzzing with discussions about abusive relationships alongside the hashtag “WhyIStayed,” frozen pizza maker DiGiorno sent this supposedly funny tweet: “#whyistayed You had pizza.” Twitter users were outraged and the company apologized, saying it hadn’t paid attention to the context of the conversation.