Humor in Marketing: Why Funny Brands Grow Faster

Humor in marketing works because it lowers defenses, builds memory, and creates the kind of emotional association that no amount of rational messaging can manufacture. Brands that make people laugh tend to be remembered, shared, and trusted at a disproportionate rate. The problem is that most marketers treat humor as a risk rather than a tool, and so they default to safe, forgettable work instead.

This article is about why that instinct is wrong, when humor actually earns its place in a strategy, and how to use it without embarrassing yourself or your client.

Why Humor Is a Strategic Asset, Not a Creative Luxury

Spend enough time in agency boardrooms and you will notice a pattern. A creative team presents a genuinely funny campaign concept. The room laughs. Then someone from the client side says, “But does it communicate the product benefit clearly enough?” And within twenty minutes, the humor has been diluted into something polite and pointless.

I have watched this happen more times than I can count. Not because the humor was wrong, but because humor makes people nervous. It feels uncontrollable. It is harder to defend in a PowerPoint. And if it lands badly, someone will get blamed. So the path of least resistance is always the safer, blander option.

That instinct is commercially expensive. Humor is one of the few tools in marketing that can make a brand genuinely memorable to people who were not already paying attention. It creates what researchers in behavioral science call emotional encoding, the process by which experiences attached to strong feelings are stored more reliably in long-term memory. You do not need a study to confirm this. You already know it. You can probably recall a TV ad from twenty years ago that made you laugh. Can you recall one that explained a product feature clearly?

If you are thinking about where humor fits within a broader commercial strategy, the go-to-market and growth strategy hub covers the full picture of how brand, audience, and channel decisions connect to revenue outcomes.

What Humor Actually Does in the Brain (Without Overclaiming)

When something makes you laugh, several things happen simultaneously. Your attention sharpens. Your guard drops. And you feel a moment of connection with whoever made you laugh. In a marketing context, that connection transfers to the brand. It is not magic. It is just how social bonding works, and humor has been a mechanism for it for as long as humans have communicated.

The implication for marketers is straightforward. If your goal is to reach people who are not already in-market for your product, humor is one of the most efficient ways to earn attention and create positive brand associations before any purchase consideration exists. This is the upper-funnel case for humor, and it is strong.

Earlier in my career I was obsessed with lower-funnel performance. Click-through rates, conversion rates, cost per acquisition. I believed that if you optimised hard enough at the bottom of the funnel, growth would follow. It took me years to fully appreciate that a significant portion of what performance marketing gets credited for is demand that was already there. The person who clicked your paid search ad was probably going to buy from you anyway. You captured intent. You did not create it.

Creating demand, reaching people before they are looking, is a different job. And humor is one of the few things that can make a brand worth noticing to someone who has no immediate reason to care. That is not a small thing. That is the difference between a brand that grows and one that just competes for the same shrinking pool of existing intent.

The Brands That Get It Right and What They Have in Common

Look at the brands that have built genuine cultural presence through humor over the past decade. Innocent Drinks in the UK. Oatly. Dollar Shave Club. Wendy’s on social media. Old Spice. What they share is not a particular style of humor. Some are dry, some are absurdist, some are self-deprecating. What they share is consistency and commitment.

Humor does not work as a one-off. A single funny ad might get shared and forgotten. A brand that is reliably, consistently funny over time builds a personality that people actively seek out. That personality becomes a reason to choose them over a competitor, even when the product difference is marginal.

Dollar Shave Club is the clearest example of humor as a growth strategy rather than a creative flourish. Their launch video was not a campaign. It was a brand positioning statement delivered through comedy. It told you exactly what the brand thought of the incumbents, what it thought of inflated pricing, and what kind of company it was. All of it was funny. None of it was accidental. And it drove growth that no amount of performance spend could have manufactured from scratch. Go-to-market strategies are getting harder to execute, and brands that build genuine emotional distinctiveness have a structural advantage over those that rely purely on paid reach.

Oatly is a more recent case worth studying. They made oat milk interesting, which should be impossible. They did it by being funny, weird, and deliberately imperfect in their copy and packaging. They treated their audience as intelligent adults who were bored of corporate marketing. It worked because it was true to a genuine brand point of view, not because someone decided humor was on-trend.

Why Most Attempts at Funny Marketing Fall Flat

There is a version of humor in marketing that does not work, and it is worth being specific about why.

The first failure mode is humor that is about the brand rather than for the audience. A brand congratulating itself on being quirky, or making an in-joke that only the marketing team finds funny, is not connecting with anyone. Humor works when it reflects something the audience already feels, thinks, or experiences. It is an act of recognition, not performance.

The second failure mode is humor that undermines trust. This is particularly common in categories where credibility matters: finance, healthcare, professional services. There is a version of funny that makes you seem approachable, and a version that makes you seem unserious. The line between them is real, and it is worth knowing where it is before you cross it.

I judged the Effie Awards for several years, which gave me an unusual view of what effective marketing actually looks like versus what wins creative awards. The campaigns that performed commercially were almost never the ones that were trying to be funny for its own sake. The humor in the best-performing work was always in service of a clear strategic idea. It was not decoration. It was the mechanism by which the idea landed.

The third failure mode is inconsistency. A brand that is funny once and then reverts to corporate messaging has not built anything. It has confused people. Humor requires commitment. If you are going to use it as part of your brand voice, it needs to be present across touchpoints and sustained over time. Otherwise it reads as a campaign stunt rather than a genuine personality.

The fourth failure mode, and perhaps the most damaging, is humor that punches down. Anything that derives its comedy from mocking a group, a type of person, or a shared prejudice will eventually cost you. Not because audiences are humorless, but because humor that excludes or demeans creates a specific kind of negative association that is hard to undo. The safest targets for brand humor are the brand itself, the category, and the absurdities of everyday life.

Where in the Funnel Does Humor Belong?

Humor is not equally effective at every stage of the customer experience, and treating it as a universal tactic is a mistake.

At the top of the funnel, humor is close to ideal. You are trying to reach people who have no existing relationship with your brand and no immediate reason to pay attention. Humor earns that attention. It creates a reason to watch, read, or share something that would otherwise be ignored. It also begins building the emotional memory that will matter later when that person does enter a buying cycle.

In the middle of the funnel, humor can work but needs to be used more carefully. Someone who is actively evaluating your product still wants to like you, but they also want to trust you. A tone that is too playful can undermine confidence at the point where confidence is most important. The best mid-funnel humor tends to be lighter touch: a wry line in an email, a self-aware product description, a social post that acknowledges the awkwardness of the sales process itself.

At the bottom of the funnel, humor is largely irrelevant. Someone who is ready to buy does not need to be entertained. They need friction removed and confidence confirmed. If your checkout page is trying to be funny, you have probably misread the room.

This funnel logic is also why humor is so often undervalued. Most marketing measurement systems are better at capturing lower-funnel activity than upper-funnel brand building. If you cannot easily attribute a funny video to a conversion, the finance team will question its value. But the inability to measure something precisely is not the same as the thing having no value. I have spent a lot of time in my career pushing back on the idea that unmeasured equals unimportant. The brands that abandoned brand-building in favor of pure performance marketing in the 2010s are now paying the price in share of voice and pricing power.

How to Build a Business Case for Humor

If you are trying to get internal sign-off on a campaign with genuine humor in it, the strategic argument is more useful than the creative one. Do not walk in talking about tone of voice and brand personality. Walk in talking about attention economics and memory structures.

The attention economy argument is simple. Organic reach is declining across almost every channel. Growth strategies that rely on paid reach alone are getting more expensive and less efficient. Content that earns attention through genuine entertainment value, humor being one of the most reliable mechanisms for that, has a structural cost advantage over content that has to buy every impression.

The memory argument is equally straightforward. Brand recall is the foundation of consideration. If people cannot remember you when they enter a buying cycle, you are not in the game. Humor is one of the most reliable ways to create the kind of emotional encoding that survives the gap between first exposure and purchase decision. That gap can be months or years in many categories.

The differentiation argument is perhaps the most commercially compelling. Most categories are full of brands saying the same things in the same way. A brand with a genuinely funny, consistent voice stands out not just aesthetically but commercially. It gives people a reason to choose you that has nothing to do with price or product specification. In categories where product parity is real, that is not a small advantage.

When I was growing an agency from around twenty people to over a hundred, one of the things I noticed was that the clients who grew fastest were not always the ones with the best products. They were often the ones with the strongest brand personality. Personality creates preference, and preference reduces price sensitivity. That is a straightforward commercial equation.

Practical Considerations Before You Commit to Funny

Before you decide that humor is the right direction for your brand, there are a few questions worth answering honestly.

First: does your brand have a genuine point of view? Humor without a perspective is just noise. The brands that use comedy effectively are usually saying something specific about the world, their category, or their customers. If you cannot articulate what your brand actually thinks, the humor will feel hollow.

Second: do you have the internal culture to sustain it? Funny marketing requires fast decisions, a tolerance for imperfection, and leaders who will defend creative risk when something does not land perfectly. If your approval process involves fifteen stakeholders and three rounds of legal review, humor will be edited out of existence before it reaches the public.

Third: does your audience actually want this? Some audiences do not respond to humor from brands in certain categories. This is not a universal truth, but it is worth testing rather than assuming. Understanding your growth loops through direct audience feedback is a better foundation for creative decisions than category convention alone.

Fourth: are you willing to be consistent? A one-off funny campaign is a missed opportunity. Humor builds brand value through repetition and familiarity. If you are not prepared to commit to a comedic voice across your marketing over an extended period, the return on investment will be much lower than it could be.

Creator partnerships are one route to building humor into your content at scale, particularly for brands that do not have strong internal creative capabilities. Working with creators on go-to-market campaigns can bring an authenticity and comedic sensibility that is genuinely hard to manufacture in-house. what matters is finding creators whose humor aligns with your brand values rather than just your demographic targets.

The Relationship Between Humor and Brand Trust

There is a persistent belief in certain marketing circles that humor and credibility are in tension. That if you are funny, people will not take you seriously. I think this is mostly wrong, and I think it comes from a misunderstanding of what trust actually is.

Trust in a brand is not the same as respect for an institution. People trust brands they like, brands that feel human, brands that seem to understand them. Humor, done well, signals all of those things. It says: we are confident enough in what we do that we do not need to be solemn about it. That is a form of credibility, not a threat to it.

The brands that struggle to reconcile humor with trust are usually the ones whose trust is built on formality rather than genuine quality. If your credibility depends on sounding serious, that is a fragile foundation. The strongest brands can afford to be funny because their quality is self-evident. The humor becomes an expression of confidence, not a distraction from it.

I have seen this play out in financial services, which is traditionally one of the most humor-averse categories in marketing. Financial services brands face real go-to-market challenges in building trust with new audiences. The brands that have started using humor carefully in that category, not to make light of serious financial decisions but to make themselves feel more human and accessible, have generally found that it helps rather than hurts conversion. Because the barrier to engagement in financial services is often not skepticism about the product. It is the feeling that the brand is not for someone like you.

Humor dissolves that barrier faster than almost anything else.

If this article has prompted you to think more broadly about how brand decisions connect to commercial outcomes, the go-to-market and growth strategy hub covers the strategic frameworks that sit behind those choices, from positioning and audience selection through to channel and measurement decisions.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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