It’s April 1st – April Fools Day. If you work in an office, keep an eye out for pranks. And if you browse the web, you’ll need to take everything with a huge grain of salt today. Many tech businesses (notably Google) jump right into the April Fools fun with sometimes subtle jokes across their online properties. While all in good fun, is having a sense of humor also good for business?
To truly tell if a sense of humor has a positive impact on your business, you’d need to do some type of formal experiment with metrics. For example, you could take a group of customers, randomly divide them in two and use a sense of humor with one and nothing special with the other. Then you could measure whether the sense of humor entices more purchases, loyalty, etc.
But all of that is a lot of work and I think we can do a bit of less scientific measurement…
Have you ever used Website Grader from HubSpot? Enter your website and email addresses and Website Grader will return a grade based on your content, design, and general SEO best practices. It only takes maybe a minute, but while you wait, you’re entertained with messages like:
Or maybe you’ve seen Zappos’ latest commercials? With the Zappets who depict the real people you’ll speak to if you contact customer service:
Google often shows its personality by changing the logo of the search engine for special events (such as the Olympics). It has also celebrated April Fools Day with interesting jokes across its sites (some of which are often inside jokes). Today, Google changed their name to:
Companies with a sense of humor humanize themselves, making it easier for us (as people) to connect with them. You probably like people with a sense of humor (unless you don’t have one yourself) because they’re easier to communicate with and relate to. I believe the same is true of companies. By showing a bit of humor, some personality, some human-ness, companies are able to connect on a deeper level than just a faceless product or service provider.
What do you think? Are you more or less likely to do business with a company with a sense of humor?
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