Humour in marketing: When did B2B become so boring?

Is it just me or does B2B marketing take itself way too seriously?

Scan through LinkedIn for five minutes. Read any B2B homepage. Sit through one more “thought leadership” webinar. It’s all the same flavourless soup of corporate crap.

We’re drowning in “digital transformation” whitepapers that nobody reads. SEO keyword-stuffed blogs that rehash the same five points. Ebooks with the same corporate jargon repeated ad nauseam. 

Everyone’s so busy trying to sound “professional” they’ve forgotten how to sound human.

So, why is B2B marketing afraid of having a personality?

Why people are scared to be funny

There’s three main reasons why B2B brands think comedy and marketing don’t mix. 

1. It can be pretty hard to pull off

Good comedy takes skill. Even professional comedians bomb sometimes. So when you’re trying to explain complex enterprise software AND be funny? That’s not easy. 

Most marketers would rather play it safe than risk the corporate equivalent of a tumbleweed rolling across the conference room.

2. There’s a lot of red tape (and a thousand stakeholders to please) 

Business is serious business.

And in B2B, that means its stakeholder city. By the time your witty headline has done the rounds, it’s gone through 10 rounds of revisions and been sanitised into submission.

What started as something with personality quickly becomes focus-grouped into oblivion. Unfortunately, stakeholder intervention is an annoying (and recurring,) problem that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.

3. It won’t always land the way you want it to 

Humour is subjective. What makes the creative team crack up might leave the C-suite stone-faced. Or worse, offended. 

It’s par for the course, but good humour is lot of trial and error. You’ll get it wrong sometimes, maybe spectacularly wrong. Someone will always think you’ve gone too far, while someone else thinks you haven’t gone far enough.

One person’s clever is another person’s cringe. That’s just the reality of trying something different. 

So…is it actually worth it?

After reading that, you’re probably thinking…it’s not. 

But all these objections miss one fundamental truth: people use humour. People LIKE humour. It’s how we communicate. It’s what makes us human. 

And when you strip humour from your marketing, you don’t sound professional. You sound like a robot. Humour is the default setting for a lot of human communication. It’s the corporate speak that’s unnatural.

91% of people prefer brands that use humour and 80% are more likely to buy from companies that make them smile. 

So I think it’s time for B2B brands to loosen their collars and have a bit of fun. 

(Incidentally, that’s what we did by creating the B2B Marketer’s Marketplace. It’s somewhere for our fun, creative, and silly ideas to come to life, so check it out.)

How to get comedy right

Your humour needs a reason to exist 

Tacking on a witty subject line doesn’t make your content funny. Neither does that meme that’s about a decade out of date. Real humour has to be fundamental to your point, not window dressing.

Often, the best B2B comedy comes from truth. Take a stab at something absurd in the industry, play on an outdated marketing troupe, or subvert an established truth. 

Structure matters, but not how you think 

In B2B marketing, we put the important stuff first. In comedy, the punchline goes last. This creates tension: do you sacrifice the joke for the message or the message for the joke?

Neither. The best B2B humour makes the joke IS the message. When you nail it, the funny part and the business point become inseparable.

Behind the scenes, don’t be afraid to be silly

If you’re not laughing during brainstorms, you’re doing them wrong. New connections make us laugh, so even if the final piece ends up serious, the thinking behind it should be playful. 

The best B2B ideas often start as jokes that turn out to be brilliant, and sometimes just throwing out left-field ideas and having a bit of fun is all you need to get the ball rolling. 

Know when to kill your darlings

Unfortunately, sometimes that brilliant joke just doesn’t fit. Maybe it’s too insider. Maybe it overshadows the actual point. Maybe it’s funny to you because you’ve been working on this campaign for three months and everything seems hilarious.

Here’s the test: if removing the humour doesn’t change the core message, the humour probably shouldn’t be there. But if removing it makes the whole thing fall flat? That’s when you fight for it.

The bottom line (because we need one of those, apparently)

Even good, well-calculated humour is risky and (even if you absolutely nail it,) you will end up alienating some customers.

But at the end of the day, it’s human.

Anything that makes you sound a little less corporate and more like a real person is invaluable. And done right, it works wonders. 

Still, it’s important to not lose sight of why you’re creating a piece of content. 

When your piece is centred about something funny, something engaging, something actually interesting, then you can cut through the crap with a piece that resonates with people. 

Then again, if you’re sacrificing your core idea just for a throwaway joke, cut it. 

And if you’re looking for partners who get it, writers who can be funny AND strategic, and agencies that won’t suck the life out of your campaigns, get in touch. 

Because life’s too short for boring marketing.