Brands that laugh all the way to the bank
By Rhymer Rigby
Published: January 6 2011 21:51 | Last updated: January 6 2011 21:51
Passengers on Kulula, the South African airline, might find themselves looking twice when they gaze out of the terminal window at their aircraft. Last year, the carrier painted one of its jets in what it calls its Flying 101 livery. The aircraft is now a shade of green with text on the fuselage. Next to words such as “co-pilot”, “engine #2” and “black box”, arrows indicate their location.
EDITOR’S CHOICE
“Humour is part of our brand ethos,” says Nadine Damen, Kulula’s marketing manager, “although it’s almost less about being funny and more about being down to earth and honest. We have other aeroplanes painted in cow spots, camouflage and one with a zipper down the side.”
A sense of fun, she says, runs through the brand. “Our safety briefing was written by comedians. We got a lot of flak for this at first but what we discovered was that using a bit of humour actually makes people listen.”
Humour is one way that brands can punch far above their weight in terms of awareness. When it works, a funny campaign or brand identity can differentiate a commodity product from its peers.
“In a few sectors like beer, it’s almost a category norm,” says Jim Prior, chief executive of The Partners, a branding consultancy. However, he adds, it is hard to do well. “Generally, you see some humour in advertising, which is quite discreet. But it’s rarely all that funny and it rarely goes all the way through. To do that, you have to be brave and confident.”
Many brands manage to be sporadically funny but those that successfully build themselves around humour are far more unusual. The UK soft drink brand Tango did it from the mid-1990s with a series of advertisements. The most popular featured an orange blobby man who slapped drinkers with the catchphrase “You’ve been Tangoed”, a slogan that passed into common usage.
A more recent example is Comparethemarket.com, the insurance comparison site whose brand identity centres on a Russian meerkat called Aleksandr Orlov and the fact that comparethemarket.com is easily confused with comparethemeerkat.com.
“In 2008, we’d been going for a year and research suggested we had a big issue with name recognition,” says Kal Atwal, the website’s managing director. All the comparison sites “had ‘compare’ in their names”. The campaign had a tangible impact: monthly site visits have gone up from 50,000 to 2m.
The meerkat has proved so popular that a number of spin-off products were launched, including an “autobiography” of Orlov that was published in time for Christmas. “Even the Russians seem to like him,” says Ms Atwal. “Russian TV covered the book launch.”
Humour can also reinvigorate older brands. Old Spice has found a new audience with its “Smell like a man, man” ads. Iain Tait of Wieden+Kennedy, the agency behind the campaign, says because a lot of men’s toiletries are bought for them by women, “we needed to create a character who was adored by ladies but who men don’t find threatening”. The answer was a character who combines extreme handsomeness with being funny. “It’s a very knowing kind of humour that comes from the character playing it straight,” says Mr Tait.
Why don’t more brands take the plunge? Mr Prior says companies worry that being amusing makes people question their credibility. But, he argues, “consumers are more sophisticated than that. If you take an airline, passengers know that airlines take safety very seriously.”
“[The Old Spice ads don’t] send up the product and he doesn’t make fun of himself,” explains Mr Tait. “You need to treat the audience with a bit of respect and credit them with intelligence. When you try and spoon-feed them the gag, that’s when it becomes embarrassing.”
Still, as the case of Kulula shows, the potential rewards are huge. “We’re a little airline at the bottom of Africa,” says Ms Damen. “Who in the wider world would have heard of us if we hadn’t done this?”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.
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