Humor is a great leverage for both products and services - it breaks the monotony, boredom; relaxes the audience making them more receptive to the product/service.
However humor needs to have the right balance, overdo it or use it at the wrong time and it can cause an irrepairable damage. One of the most pathetic uses of dark humor has been by Specsavers lately when Dr. Kerry Chant's glasses broke while delivering a public message - the marketing team had no sense of respect for the NSW Chief Health Officer or the pademic we are in.
But there are so many products and services out there who are leveraging humor so well, here's some of my favourites:
[Call on hold] Waiting for the call to be transferred to an agent could be time consuming. Plus the fact that a customer is on hold means a risk of losing the customer if aid is not provided in the right amount of time. And what better way that humor to keep the customer engaged ? I recently moved houses and needed the Aussie Broadband agent to check the account set up details for me. While I was on hold, I was delighted to hear one liner jokes rather than the monotonous wait message! Aussie Broadband is definately raising the bar in terms of exceptional customer service.
[Release notes] Release notes are boring and nobody reads them but its one of those mandatory stuff to provide. However Slack has put an amazing twist to them with their witty and different approach to writing the release notes - on dull and boring days, I literally read all of them for some smiles :)
[Error 404] Who thought error especially the notorious 404 error page can be a great way to showcase some wit and branding. Here's Pixar's 404 page using one of their iconic characters from Inside Out (hats off to the creative genius behind it) :
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