Come On Marketers…Lighten Up!

The world can be such a serious place. Having three children who are now of news-watching age reminds me of this every day.

If it’s not bush fires…It’s terrorism. If it’s not terrorism it’s a horrific car accident. Murders. Recession. Concession. Depression. Blah blah blah. You get my drift.

However, the good news is that within all the gloom lies opportunities for smart marketers and business owners to get peoples’ attention.

This opportunity is an insight in to the way we’re all thinking and feeling. You see, we know everthing’s not OK, and we’re looking for any rays of sunshine to put a smile on our face.

What I’m about to suggest is not about creating sugary sweet messages that infer that if we buy this or try that then all will be good.

Uh, uh…It’s about taking a light-hearted attitude to the way we promote our business.

Stop being so serious about it for a minute and ask yourself this…”What would my business message be if I just wanted to entertain and  reward my customers?”

A local shopping strip did this only recently with this clever use of a traffic sign…No hard sell, no big logo, no “do this, do that”. Just some simple, light messages aimed at making people smile. Isn’t that beautiful? And in smiling…they just might hang about that little bit longer….spend a little more money…walk away happy. Now, how’s that for a real commercial outcome?!

What do you think? Can you adopt this approach for your business? How?

One Response to “Come On Marketers…Lighten Up!”

1. Graeme Bowman Says:
   March 6th, 2009 at 7:23 pm

   Marketers do need to lighten up at times, to cut through the clutter. Get people smiling and you change their emotional state. Snap someone out of their grumpiness and they’ll be more receptive to your message.

   The short comments of the cheeky road sign could be adapted to something like Twitter. A brand could regularly tweet quirky comments that were extremely topical, almost right up to the minute. eg a Melbourne brand could tweet about Friday night’s earthquake, or the cricket score. The brand would just need to create tweets daily. A clever tweeting campaign could attract a cult following.

   For my own part, as a Corporate Comedian, I often help marketers to lighten up by creating low cost product launch concepts based on humour.

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