Ever notice that funny people are easy to love but hilarious marketing is hard to find?

Ever notice that kindness is magnetic but advertising that feels human is abnormal?

Companies are obsessed with sounding like experts at the expense of everything that draws us to people, as people — silly, sweet, sometimes nonsensical little meat dumplings that we are.

We all want to be happy, and we all want to belong.

Marketing without humanity is often nothing more than fancied-up extortion: shaming, haranguing, browbeating, scaring, or “impressing” into a transaction.

That’s no way to run a sustainable business (or any kind of healthy relationship) and it never leads to loyalty, true community, or a product to be proud of.

And make no mistake — your product isn’t the product.

You’re the product.

The unique, inimitable way you solve your customers’ problems.

Special features or differentiators don’t cut it anymore — you’re a box of Cheez-Its in a grocery store with 55,000 other food-ish items, with a customer who isn’t even sure they like Cheez-Its. Damn.

So if you aren’t standing out — if there is nothing unicorn-y about you — then you’re just noise. Quacking that makes people go “Gawwwwddd. Make it stop.”

Humor and empathy are the foundations of fun, persuasive, and memorable marketing that won’t just make you unbeatable, karate kick your revenue to a new level, and create a brand ambassador out of every customer; they’ll also make you a force for good.

Humor and empathy get people’s attention — and keep them — because they’re rooted in what matters most: belonging, safety, kindness, comfort, and hope, to name a few.

And in a world increasingly filled with stuff that doesn’t matter, that truncates our humanity, that glorifies a sanitized reality, that says nothing and means nothing and won’t last and treats us like a wallet or a checkmark or a toaster oven, 

people crave goodness.

They want what’s real, not perfection.

They need a reprieve from the dumpster fire of daily existence.

They’re aching for belly laughs that remind them why they get out of bed in the morning.

They’re longing for a hand held out, not to just grab their money and solve their surface-level problem, but to say, “Me too. We’re all in this together.”

If you offer those things to your customers through humor and empathy, your business will never be the same.

And neither will they.