This guy from out of town walks into a bar. A couple of seconds after he enters, a man sitting at the bar yells "forty-seven" with great gusto, and immediately, all the people in the bar start laughing uproariously. Then there's complete silence. A few minutes later, somebody the guy can't see yells "one hundred five" in a high-pitched voice, and again, the bar is filled with laughter.
"What's going on?" the out-of-towner asks a woman sitting next to him.
"Well," she answers, "we've all heard the same jokes so many times before that a while back, we decided to assign each of the funniest jokes a number, and to save time and energy, we yell out the number."
Right then, somebody else at the bar says "twenty-three." This time, though, there is no laughter. Only a resounding silence.
"Did everybody forget what funny story goes with twenty-three," the guy asks?
"Not at all," says the woman. "It's just that some people can tell a joke, and some people can't."
Using humor well takes a certain talent, and this fact is particularly important when it comes to personal selling and media advertising. In retailing, genial humor warms the selling situation, but the problem with humor is that it can draw attention from the selling points. Studies conducted at University of Basel in Switzerland and Radboud University in The Netherlands found that humor in ads helped enhance memory for the ads but interfered with memory for the brand names in the ads. Researchers at University of Cincinnati and St. Vincent College in Pennsylvania found that humor in retailing is most effective when it is novel and unexpected.
I'm thinking that if at that bar, three people in a row yell out "forty-seven," by the third time, there won't be much laughter.
No comments:
Post a Comment