Telecom Plus Utility Warehouse - are they having a laugh?

 Telecom Plus, the company behind the Utility Warehouse Discount Club, are using humour to get across the message about their award winning products and services. Is this a bold move or a risky move? And does humour really work in marketing?

First of all, the concept is not new.  Humour in advertising is generally considered to be a 'softly softly' approach to marketing rather than the direct sell and, as we know, people generally do not like to be 'sold to'.  But the margin for error is vast because, what may be funny to creative advertising executives may not necessarily be funny to the public. On the other hand, it may be so funny that only the sketch is remembered and not the company or product. In our opinion, it is important for any company considering using humour in marketing to know their target audience.  As an example of too little research, for instance, would be the Pepsodent ad.  How much did they know about their target audience when they failed to impress residents in one area with its 'white teeth' promotion, when the local people ate beetle and tobacco to keep their teeth black, which was considered to be sexy?. Mistakes like this are not only unfunny, but they are costly and damaging. Telecom Plus, with its UK based products, clearly have had to take UK humour into account, which is a very different kind of humour than would be found in other countries. But even so, British humour is diverse.

Next, it is all too easy to create a great production that lacks great copy.  In other words the ad can be slick, clever, funny, creative and even a little whacky, but without great copy they won't be believable, memorable or persuasive. But we think that Telecom Plus have been clever in that they've commissioned two very well known British comediennes for their ads.  They talk about the products in a light-hearted bantering manner without using race, sex, religion, disability or social discrimination as a source of humour. They are brief, informative and easy to watch. Yet we still have to ask the question of whether people prefer to be given the information in a no-nonsense straightforward way?

Perhaps this is the key to why humour in marketing seems to be more successful in viral marketing than it is in conventional marketing, in that the ads are intended only as an 'ice-breaker' between a prospect and a distributor, not as a complete sales tool, which is the function of many tv and newspaper advertising campaigns. Telecom Plus do not advertise their products. They use distributors, rather like Avon, Kleeneze, Herbalife and many other successful and well-known referral marketing companies.  The ads therefore take the place of, or form part of, a personal presentation, yet they are delivered in a more professional way than many sales people can often manage themselves.

Then again, perhaps we're over-analyzing. Perhaps, in today's economic climate, with bad news all around us, Telecom Plus are simply giving us a laugh.

Why not judge for yourself and check out the videos