Years ago, when I was working in corporate marketing, our advertising agency came to us with an idea for a campaign featuring Dame Edna Everage.
It was funny. Dame Edna was enormously recognisable and the campaign would undoubtedly have attracted attention. We also had a substantial advertising budget.
But we didn’t do it.
The concern wasn’t whether people would notice the campaign – it was whether Dame Edna would overwhelm the brand and the message we were trying to communicate.
Would people remember our brand and what we were trying to say or would they simply remember a very funny Dame Edna advertisement? And, more importantly, would it persuade them to buy from us?
Humour can be an incredibly powerful advertising tool but getting a laugh and building a brand aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Research from Kantar supports this. Humorous advertising tends to be more distinctive, involving and emotionally engaging but simply making someone laugh doesn’t guarantee they’ll remember who the advertising was for or act on the message.
Aldi is an interesting example of getting that relationship right. Over many years, Aldi Australia has developed a particular style of humour – often deadpan, slightly absurd and unmistakably Aldi. But its effectiveness isn’t simply the result of consistency and budget.
The humour Aldi used supports its positioning in the market. Aldi has always presented itself as an alternative to the mainstream supermarkets: the challenger that operates differently, sells differently and asks consumers to think differently about how they shop.
Its advertising reflects that position. It can afford to be less conventional, less serious and more irreverent because being different is fundamental to the brand. In fact, the humour helps reinforce the difference.
And importantly, the product, price or proposition is usually integral to the humour. The advertising isn’t simply entertaining us and then attaching an Aldi logo at the end. The reason we’re laughing is generally connected to what Aldi is selling or what the brand represents. That’s a very different proposition from hiring a famous comedian, creating something hilarious and hoping some of the attention transfers to the brand.
So where does that leave an SME?
I don’t think the answer is to avoid humour because you don’t have an Aldi-sized advertising budget. In some ways, humour can be even more valuable when the budget is smaller. If you can’t afford enormous reach and repetition, being distinctive and memorable matters enormously.
But there are some important questions to consider.
→ Is it right for the audience?
Humour depends on context, culture and shared understanding. What is funny to one audience can be irrelevant – or even alienating – to another.
→ Is it authentic to the brand and its positioning?
An SME can absolutely develop its own distinctive sense of humour but it needs to reinforce how the business wants to be perceived. A challenger brand might have considerable freedom to poke fun at established conventions. A premium brand might use wit rather than irreverence. A business operating in a highly sensitive environment may need to use humour much more selectively.
The question isn’t simply, ‘Can our brand be funny?’. It’s whether the particular style of humour strengthens the position you want your brand to occupy.
→ Is the product or brand part of the humour?
For me, this is critical. If you can remove the logo and replace it with a competitor’s without changing the joke, you may have created something entertaining but not necessarily effective advertising.
If the humour comes from the product, the customer problem, the brand personality or something genuinely distinctive about the business, the two become much harder to separate.
→ And what does the budget need to achieve?
A major corporation can use mainstream advertising, digital media, social, outdoor and repeated exposure to build the connection between a creative idea and its brand over time. Most SMEs have a much smaller window in which to make that connection.
That doesn’t mean the creative should be safer – arguably it means it needs to be better. Humour can make a small business distinctive, human and memorable. Used consistently and strategically, it can become part of a brand’s personality and something customers recognise and even look forward to.
But the objective isn’t simply to make people laugh. Years ago, Dame Edna would almost certainly have made our audience laugh. But would they have remembered our brand? Would they have understood what we wanted to say?
And ultimately, would they have been any more likely to buy from us? For me, that’s still the test.
