8th of March 2024
Is laughter the best growth medicine?
I can’t tell a joke. I love jokes, but I can never remember them well enough repeat without screwing ins one way. One of my favourite jokes in a beer ad*. I never remember the brand, just that it has ‘beer’ ‘dog’ and ‘a man pretending to be blind’. We like to laugh and some brands make us laugh in advertising. So why don’t we mentally reward brands that makes us laugh? Its because when what is memorable is unrelated to buying, so is advertising’s effect.
When it comes to emotions in advertising, you need to think beyond the joke to get the last laugh. There are some common areas where marketers (and researchers) draw faulty conclusions about humour, and other emotions, in advertising:
If the joke works the ad works
A key role of advertising is to build useful brand memories. The danger with any joke is it sucks up all the viewer’s cognitive energy and none is left over for the brand or the message. This is a form of ‘vampire effect’ that has been found for celebrities in advertising. A well-known celebrity gets more attention than an equally attractive but unknown model, and this extra attention is at the expense of attention to the brand (see Efrgen paper in key references). A good joke makes you think, but often about something irrelevant to the brand or the category. The effort to generate the emotion is then wasted. An effective joke in advertising channels that cognitive attention to the brand and message, not away from it.
If someone loves the joke, they will love the brand
Another common error is misunderstanding how emotions add value to the brand. It’s not about emotion-to-transfer, but rather emotion-as-transport. The value is not in the emotion itself, but that the emotional response can help create deeper processing of the memories you want to embed. The emotion-as-transport model means to make it work, you need to clearly articulate the cargo you want the emotion to carry. This cargo is (hopefully) the brand and the message.
Overt branding will ruin the joke
While the idea that too much branding ruins an ad is a pervasive fallacy, it rears up prominently when we deal with humour. Actually the evidence shows there is no relationship between the amount of branding, or when you place the branding, and how much people enjoy an advertisement. Here are some examples of the relationship between correct branding and advertising likeability from Chapter 4 in Building Distinctive Brand Assets. A ‘light touch’ on branding will however negatively affect how many people remember the brand. If you have to hold back the brand to make the humour work then the ad might be funny, but the results are unlikely to make you smile, let alone laugh.
Read full article in MediaCat Magazine.
