Humor Elements
A lot of people when they read Reader’s Digest, first page they’d turn to is Laughter the Best Medicine, followed by Life’s Like That and All In a Day’s Work. After they are done with the humors and jokes, then only they peruse other serious topics or skip them entirely.
Many of us are fond of jokes, or contents that have humor elements. Adults need laughter to release tension, children simply laugh to express their happiness. That’s why talk shows, cartoons, comics and comedies have permanent markets. Even in courting, when you can make a woman laugh, half of the battle is over.
Commercials that have humor substances usually hit the right button, customers simply like you when you make them laugh.
For consumer products, we are not short of funny commercials, or witty print ads that are quite entertaining; but when it comes to industrial products, all these humor elements suddenly disappear. You flip through any industrial product magazines, all the words you can use to describe their ads and articles would be boring, plain, dull, dreary, monotonous and lifeless.
It is the same for industrial product tradeshows. From the brochures they distribute, the posters they display, and the backdrops they overhang; the pictures shown normally would be a direct shot of products that frequently carried plain taglines or no taglines at all, followed by some contents that are nothing but educative. And they expect you to be a quick learner, to learn everything on your brief stay at their booths. The only eye-catching item in the exhibition hall would be the sexy models hired to hand out marketing materials, or roaming the hall glamorously with placards.
I always believe industrial products needed to inject more humor elements in their sales and marketing materials, in order to bring a vivid image to their already uninteresting products.
When PC Mart, one of our active partners informed us that they will move to a new retail premises soon, we proposed placing a wall ad on one side of their external wall. They agreed but insisted on one of our humorous posters, which had the magnetism to “catch the eye”, according to them.
Here I refresh some of our marketing works that have instilled humor elements. Sometimes I even think whether we should be extending the humor element to user manuals and other materials around the products or even the products itself. To amuse in a right way – now, that’s a challenging task!
by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ
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