Humor in brand communications

Humor works only as an integrated element of the archetype

A joke in one Reels video doesn't build anything if the brand remains dry and formal on packaging and in the call center. The audience reads this not as multidimensionality, but as personality splitting — and stops trusting jokes altogether. Humor gives a cumulative effect only when it is anchored at the level of the brand platform's archetypes such as 'Joker' or 'Friend' and is expressed across all channels with varying intensity but with one tone.

Humor dosage by stages of the funnel

Humor is not a universal amplifier, but a tool with varying strength of effect at each stage of the customer journey.

• Awareness. Here humor gives maximum return almost without budget. Transition from recipe content to memes and trends in Reels shows significant audience growth through memes and trending content.
• Consideration. Humor is needed precisely and must be strictly tied to the product — otherwise the 'vampire effect' comes into play, which is described below.
• Purchase intent. At this stage humor is more of a hindrance: an absurd joke distracts from the argument that should lead to payment.

The format changes with the stage: social media and memes for awareness, narrative video with humor embedded directly into the product demonstration — for consideration, a short witty message on OOH — as supporting background, not the main argument for purchase.

Humor in different industries — not a matter of taste, but a matter of statistics

Studies show variation by product category: humor is differently acceptable in connection/IT, food, and financial sectors depending on the category. This is not a ban for the financial sector, but a signal that dosage and form should be fundamentally different there.

Finance, pharma and premium sell trust, not entertainment — and that is the key difference from FMCG or IT. Studies show: humor can reduce the perception of source reliability, especially in the financial sector. For a bank or clinic, such a loss is more expensive than missed viral reach, so jokes there should either be mediated by a live human, or not be joked at all.

Vampire effect: people remember the joke, but forget the brand

Classic problem of viral advertising: the joke spreads on its own across the internet, but no one remembers the author. The effect of humor on brand recall is on average twice weaker than on recall of the video itself — people retell jokes to each other, but the brand name is the first to be omitted from the story.

To fight this, one should not weaken the joke, but structurally tie it to the product:

1. Build the joke around a specific product feature, not around the topic of the day, which has nothing to do with the brand.
2. Make the brand character or a recognizable visual code the carrier of humor — then it is physically impossible to separate the joke from the brand.
3. Check the finished material with the question: will a person remember which brand stands behind the joke after a week if the logo is removed from the frame?

Aviasales has long maintained this principle — their humor is always tied to travel audience pain points: prices, flight delays, visa bureaucracy. Jokes separate from the product almost never appear in their campaigns, so they don’t ‘fly away’ from the brand.

How to choose a humor style for a specific audience

The logic of ‘we joke because competitors joke’ without considering the audience leads to scandals like those of Dolce&Gabbana or Benetton: the campaign attracts attention, but offends viewer values and turns into a reputation crisis. Before choosing a style, three questions must be answered: age and media consumption of the audience, the nature of the relationship with the brand (a new acquaintance can tolerate less self-irony than an old friend), and the cultural context of the region.

Young audience in social networks easily accepts absurdism and memes with a short lifecycle — there is no need to explain them, they are self-evident within their platform. Mature and conservative audience responds better to self-irony and gentle domestic irony: sharp absurdity causes not a smile but bewilderment. A live human mediator often dispels distrust of humor even better than an impersonal text — in the case of OTP Bank, humorous sketches with a live speaker showed a positive effect on engagement among the audience, because the audience laughed not 'at the bank', but together with a specific person.

Where law ends and taste begins

In Russia, humor in advertising is limited not only by taste but also by law. Federal Law 'On Advertising' prohibits images that insult race, nationality, profession, social category, age, language, and religious beliefs — that is, a joke cannot be built on discrimination of these groups, even if the author finds it harmless. It is separately forbidden to use images of medical workers in advertising of dietary supplements and over-the-counter drugs, which automatically closes off an entire category of medical humor in this field.

Public research shows that the boundary of acceptability is much stricter than formal legislative norms: a significant portion of Russians considers it unacceptable to joke about health, church, and army, while the topic of personal life remains acceptable for humor. Law sets the minimum below which one cannot go, whereas public perception is the actual ceiling of acceptability, and it is this that brands often cross when falling into scandals.

What to fix in strategy and not leave to the creativity of the advertiser

Humor stops being a risky game and becomes a working tool when it is embedded in a brand archetype, rather than existing once-off from campaign to campaign; it is dosed according to the stage of the funnel — maximum at awareness, minimum at the purchase stage; it is structurally linked to the product so as not to work as a 'vampire' on itself; it is adapted to industry standards of perception and does not touch on topics that audience research by VTsIOM and the law unambiguously classify as sacrosanct. 'Hercules' and Aviasales succeed not because of one lucky joke, but because humor is part of their recognizable character, which is reproduced in every channel for years.