Your brand’s social media reads like a corporate compliance document approved by seven stakeholders. Your advertising is “professional.” Your content is “appropriate.” Your audience is bored, and they’ve been scrolling past you for years. Meanwhile, the brands actually capturing attention are the ones willing to make people laugh.
Humour in marketing isn’t unprofessional – it’s underutilised. The same psychological mechanisms that make people share jokes make them share branded content. The same emotional response that bonds friends bonds consumers to brands. Most marketers know this intuitively but fear executing it. They’ve been trained to avoid risk, and humour feels risky. It is. That’s precisely why it works.
Humour in Marketing – Psychology of Why Laughter Sells
Research on advertising effectiveness consistently shows that humorous ads generate higher recall, more positive brand associations, and stronger purchase intent than their serious counterparts. The mechanisms are well-documented:
Attention capture: Humour interrupts the scroll. In environments saturated with content, unexpected comedy creates pattern interruption that demands attention. The brain prioritises novelty, and genuine humour is perpetually novel.
Emotional association: Laughter triggers dopamine release. When your brand creates that response, the positive emotion associates with your brand identity. You’re not just remembered – you’re remembered fondly.
Social currency: People share content that makes them look good to their network. Sharing something genuinely funny signals taste and humour. Sharing corporate messaging signals nothing. Humorous content earns organic distribution that serious content cannot.
Defence bypass: Consumers approach advertising with scepticism shields raised. Humour disarms those defences. When you’re laughing, you’re not analysing persuasion tactics. The message lands before critical evaluation engages.
Brands Getting It Right
Certain brands have built entire identities around strategic humour:
Old Spice transformed from your grandfather’s aftershave to a cultural phenomenon through absurdist humour. The “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign didn’t just sell deodorant – it created shareable entertainment that happened to feature a product. Years later, people still reference those ads. That’s brand equity built through laughter.
Wendy’s Twitter account became a case study in brand voice by roasting competitors and engaging in witty exchanges. Their willingness to be genuinely funny (and occasionally savage) earned millions in earned media from a social media budget that wouldn’t cover a single TV spot.
Oatly’s packaging copy reads like someone actually human wrote it – self-aware, slightly absurd, willing to make fun of itself and its category. In an industry drowning in health claims and benefit statements, their irreverent voice creates instant differentiation.
These brands share a common trait: permission to be funny granted from leadership, not extracted through committee approval. The humour works because it’s strategically consistent, not because it was focus-grouped into safety.
Why Most Brands Aren’t Funny
Humour requires risk tolerance that corporate structures systematically eliminate. The approval chain that prevents embarrassing mistakes also prevents genuinely creative work. Every stakeholder adds a constraint. By the time legal, compliance, brand, and executive leadership have approved, anything actually funny has been sanded into inoffensive mediocrity.
The fear calculus: a failed joke creates visible embarrassment with identifiable blame. Safe, boring content creates invisible opportunity cost that nobody gets fired for. Risk-averse cultures optimise for avoiding downside rather than capturing upside.
Additionally, humour is subjective. What’s hilarious to one audience segment is offensive or confusing to another. Brands targeting broad demographics default to the lowest common denominator – content that offends nobody and delights nobody either.
Strategic Framework for Brand Humour
Effective marketing humour isn’t random comedy – it’s strategic communication that happens to be funny. The framework:
Know your audience’s humour dialect. What makes B2B software buyers laugh differs from what amuses teenage consumers. Self-deprecating humour works in some cultures and reads as weakness in others. Sarcasm lands with some demographics and confuses others. The humour must match audience sensibility, not creator preference.
Punch up, not down. Humour that mocks competitors, industry conventions, or your own brand’s limitations works. Humour that mocks customers, vulnerable groups, or serious issues backfires. The target of the joke determines whether you’re clever or cruel.
Ensure the product remains hero-adjacent. The funniest ad in history fails if nobody remembers what it was selling. Humour should spotlight the brand or product, not overshadow it. Old Spice ads are funny AND obviously about Old Spice. That’s the balance.
Be consistently funny or don’t start. A single humorous post from an otherwise corporate brand feels like an accident. Sustained comedic voice builds identity. If you can’t maintain the approach, don’t initiate it.
Risk Management Reality
Yes, humour can backfire. Jokes that land poorly create embarrassment. Jokes that offend create crises. The question isn’t whether risk exists – it’s whether the risk is manageable and whether potential upside justifies it.
Risk mitigation strategies: test with representative audience samples before broad deployment, establish clear boundaries (topics that are always off-limits), create rapid response protocols for jokes that miss, and build brand equity reserves that can absorb occasional missteps.
The uncomfortable truth: brands that never risk embarrassment also never create memorable moments. Perfect safety produces perfect obscurity. The brands everyone remembers are the ones willing to occasionally get it wrong in pursuit of getting it spectacularly right.
Where Humour Works And Where It Doesn’t
Humour effectiveness varies by context:
High-fit categories: consumer products, food and beverage, entertainment, fashion, lifestyle brands, insurance (surprisingly – GEICO and Progressive prove it works), and any category where purchase decisions aren’t life-critical.
Caution categories: healthcare (humour about symptoms works; humour about suffering doesn’t), financial services (humour about industry absurdities works; humour about people’s money worries doesn’t), B2B enterprise (humour about work frustrations works; appearing unserious about serious purchases doesn’t).
Timing matters: humour during brand awareness campaigns differs from humour during crisis response. A brand can be funny on social media and serious in customer service. The channel and context determine appropriateness, not a blanket policy.
Competitive Advantage of Joy
In markets where product differentiation is difficult – where features, prices, and quality converge – brand personality becomes a competitive advantage. The brand that makes customers smile has an edge that competitors can’t easily replicate.
Humour is difficult to copy because it requires genuine creative capability and cultural permission structures. A competitor can match your pricing overnight. They can’t match your comedic voice without looking derivative.
The brands owning their categories in 2025-2026 increasingly share this trait: they’re genuinely enjoyable to encounter. Their content is consumed voluntarily, not tolerated reluctantly. They’ve figured out that entertainment value is marketing value – and that laughter is the most efficient path to both.
If your Content Marketing reads like it was written by a committee (because it was), there’s differentiation available through creative voice. Our Creative Concept Development work helps brands find the humour that fits their identity without the cringe that damages it.
Book a consultation to explore how strategic humour could differentiate your brand – we promise to keep a straight face during the strategy session. Mostly.
