In the past, big, important companies comported themselves with dignity. Their communications might have been stylish, elegant, or smart, but they were rarely funny. Meanwhile, down among the hoi polloi, consumer brands have always aimed to amuse, with promotions we all remember and love. Here’s a rough chronology:

“Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is!”
“It leaves you breathless.”
“Promise her anything, but give her Arpege.”
“I want my Maypo.”
“It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.”
“This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?”
“Where’s the beef?”
“Mikey likes it!”
“Bet you can’t eat just one.”
“The dogs kids love to bite.”
“There are a million and one excuses for not wearing a safety belt. Some are real killers.”
“Leggo my Eggo.”
“Nuttin,’ honey.”
“Got milk?”
“Ribbit. Ribbit, Ribbit. Ribbit.”
“Can you hear me now?”
“Without us, some guys would starve.”
“iThink, therefore iMac.”
“What’s in YOUR wallet?”
“You are now free to move about the country.”
“Live richly.”

Notice anything? In the ’60s, wit was used to address unmentionables, such as tummy trouble, lunchtime martinis, or seduction. In the ’70s and ’80s, food and drink dominated, with an occasional appearance on behalf of difficult social questions. But the last six entries are recent or current, and they were from a telecom company, a burger chain, a computer company, an airline, and two banks.

We’re increasingly seeing witty, chummy communications from big business. Most of these examples are from advertising— agencies believe that radio and TV are better media for wittiness than print—but maybe design should pay attention. It’s working. IBM started running witty ads over a decade ago—remember the spots with technocrats sitting around a conference table tossing out wacky ideas? Twelve years later, they’re still doing funny business-to-business spots on prime time TV. Citibank’s current campaign is witty in a contrarian way, talking about how money matters less than quality of life. Elegant Apple, always conceptual, is now doing what amounts to gentle stand-up comedy on TV. IKEA used humor to create a virtual furniture fan club. Even the honorable old family firm Hewlett Packard is doing clever, witty branding now. Society has changed, attitudes toward authority have changed, and the big guys are trying to be our friends. There are a number of things driving this change.

1. Over the years, brand messaging has shifted from “about our stuff” to “fulfill your dreams.” It’s more about social identity now, and less about features and benefits. (Let’s face it, after decades of incremental improvement, most goods and services are pretty well refined.)

2. We’ve learned to distrust authority. Big business has to earn not only our respect, but our affection to win our loyalty.

3. The internet is shifting the balance of power in the marketplace from the corporation to the consumer. We can easily compare brand-name products to Joe’s generics on cheapstuff.com, and we need good reasons to pay more.

4. Media overload has made it ever harder to get attention. That’s a lot of change in a relatively short time, and big business has had to adapt fast. One of the most powerful tools they have to address all these problems is wit. It gets attention, it’s likable, and it says “we’re the same kind of people.” Best of all, wit is distinctive —new and different—by definition.

Ninety-four percent of advertising executives believe that humor gets attention1: Studies of reactions to actual magazine and radio ads prove they’re right. Not only that, but wittiness is a good predictor of whether an ad will succeed or fail: 53 percent of ads that people think are funny or smart succeed, while 73 percent of ads that people think are boring fail.

Hewlett Packard wants us to pay attention to them as a premium brand—they want to compete on quality, instead of price. With that in mind, they’ve upped the ante on design over the last few years, working with Goodby, Silverstein & Partners to produce smart, colorful, humanistic (i.e., subtly witty) campaigns. The payoff has been remarkable. According to Interbrand, the value of HP’s brand has gone up 24 percent. HP’s own research shows that awareness of their brand with both consumer and business audiences is up by double digits. That success has encouraged them to go further. Their recent TV ads show famous creative people using their hands to move animations around as they tell us what their laptops mean to them; the related print campaign uses colorful, creative illustrations of mystical hands combined with techie icons. This is HP?

GSP creative director Keith Anderson explains, “For years, all the computer companies have been doing the same thing: talking about features and benefits, or value for the money. We wanted to step away from the crowd for HP, and make the brand more likable, more human. We got the concept for this campaign when we realized that people put everything that’s in their heads on their computers—their lives are on their hard drives. That says ‘The PC is personal again.’ The animation and casual humor of the TV spots says that it’s all about human creativity. The illustrations in the print ads do the same thing. It’s all very friendly and approachable.”

LIKABILITY
Paul McGhee, a longtime humor researcher and popular motivational speaker, writes that humor puts people at ease and invites them to join in. It makes social interaction easier and more enjoyable. In return, funny people are generally well liked. Research with children, adolescents, and adults shows that people who are rated by their peers as having a good sense of humor are more likely to be seen as someone they want to do things with.

Citigroup gets it. People certainly have intimate relationships with their banks, but cold cash is cold, and we’re always wary of anyone who’s handling ours. In the citi campaign, humor warms things up, and puts our relationship with money in perspective. Coming from a huge financial conglomerate, that’s very refreshing.

IN-GROUP IDENTIFICATION
In 1960, Rose L.Coser published the results of her research on the social functions of humor among the staff at a mental hospital. She found that humor creates a basis for group consensus—consensus doesn’t come first, humor does. To paraphrase (you don’t want to read her text), she found that inviting others to join in laughter reaffirms the values the group holds in common, and lets the group step away from serious concerns for a moment. At the same time, it muães the inhibiting effect of authority, making it easier for management and staff to relate to each other.

Another researcher, Antonin Orbdlik, published a study in 1942 which says that humor “originates in the process of social interaction and bears the marks of the particular group by which it was created and accepted.” IBM has been using the power of wit to create social identification since 1994, when it launched Ogilvy & Mather’s “e-business on demand” campaign. Each ad in the long-running series presents a typical business problem in a funny skit—hearing hyperbolic claims from a vendor, talking to a psychiatrist about feeling lost and adrift, and so on. Viewers can identify —and laugh at their troubles for a moment.