Four Comedy Rules to Use in Strategy

There's good strategy and bad strategy. In that sense, strategy has a lot in common with comedy. Great comedians are great strategists, and there's a lot we can learn from following their example.

News 9 years ago Unknown author

The other day I was talking with a comedian friend, who's long been a critic of advertising. (It's a refreshing dose of the truth when I wax on about a brilliant brand architecture or the artful execution of a piece of content.) "That's the thing," he said, "you guys are so in your own heads that you forget the point. Do people even care about what you're saying?"

Comedians never start out to be creative. They start out to expose something real. Sometimes it's important. Sometimes it's trivial. But it's always real, and the good ones find a way to make people care about it.

According to Byron Sharp, author of "How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know," 84% of TV ads don't work. We make it too easy to skip or ignore our advertising. It happens when brands talk to themselves, invent problems that don't exist, or forget to tap into a truth.

There's good strategy and bad strategy. In that sense, strategy has a lot in common with comedy. Great comedians are great strategists, and there's a lot we can learn from following their example.