Laugh With Me: Why Humour Is Becoming the Language Brands Need to Speak

14 hours ago

7 min read

Connection is becoming increasingly important in a culture where younger consumers use humour not simply to entertain each other but to communicate feelings, navigate serious subjects and signal shared understanding. A global Omnicom Advertising and Snapchat study shows how strongly humour shapes the way Gen Z and Gen Alpha interact, with the India findings revealing significant benefits for brands that genuinely understand the joke. This is driving Humour-Led Branding — using comedy as a cultural language that can help brands Laugh With Me rather than simply advertise to me.

Why Everyone Is Talking About It: Funny Brands Get More Attention

The commercial numbers are striking. Among India's Next Gen consumers, 91% say they pay closer attention to funny brands, 88% say they are more likely to consider buying from one and 93% say they go on to tell other people about it. Humour therefore has the potential to move consumers beyond noticing advertising toward consideration and advocacy.

But the study also reveals the difficulty. Four in five young Indians say brand humour often misses the mark, with respondents describing brands online as feeling like older people trying to joke with them. Younger consumers also respond positively when brands are willing to make fun of themselves, suggesting that humour works better when brands loosen control rather than appear desperate to manufacture cultural relevance.

➡️ Viral Insight: Making people laugh can win attention — but getting the joke earns connection. Younger audiences can quickly distinguish between a brand participating naturally in their culture and one trying too hard to imitate it.

Why Consumers Are Changing: Humour Is Becoming a Language for Real Feelings

The deeper story isn't simply that younger generations enjoy funny content. In India, 87% of Next Gen respondents say humour is how their generation talks about serious things, while 90% say it helps them express things they otherwise wouldn't say directly. Humour gives difficult emotions, uncomfortable experiences and shared frustrations a language that can feel easier to communicate.

That transforms humour from entertainment into a form of social connection. Understanding the joke can signal that two people recognize the same situation, frustration or cultural reference. The laugh matters, but the feeling underneath it — you understand what I mean — can matter even more.

SERIOUS FEELING → HUMOUR → SHARED UNDERSTANDING → CONNECTION

YOU GET THE JOKE → YOU GET ME → I FEEL CONNECTED

➡️ Consumer Insight: Humour gives consumers an easier way to say what can be difficult to say directly. Shared laughter becomes shared understanding — and shared understanding creates connection.

Who Is Driving This Trend: The Culture Fluent Generation

Gen Z and Gen Alpha have grown up in highly participatory social environments where humour moves rapidly through memes, comments, references, remixes and constantly changing cultural codes. The study, which surveyed 6,028 daily social-media users aged 13–28 across the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany and India, specifically examines how these generations use humour to build relationships, signal belonging and navigate culture.

For these consumers, being funny is therefore partly about cultural fluency. The joke can demonstrate who understands the context, who shares the reference and who belongs in the conversation. That creates a challenge for brands because cultural codes can move faster than traditional advertising processes.

Core Motivations: Show Me You Get Me

Connection – Laugh With MeConsumers want to share humour that creates an immediate feeling of emotional and social connection.

Understanding – Show Me You Get ItConsumers want to interact with brands that understand the situations, references and cultural codes behind the joke.

Expression – Help Me Say What I MeanConsumers want to use humour to communicate thoughts and feelings that may be uncomfortable or difficult to express directly.

Belonging – Let Me Feel Part of SomethingConsumers want to recognize shared experiences through humour and connect with others who understand the same references.

Relief – Make Serious Things Feel LighterConsumers want to use humour to navigate pressure, awkwardness and serious subjects without ignoring the reality behind them.

Authenticity – Don't Try Too HardConsumers want brands to participate naturally in humour rather than imitate youth culture in ways that feel forced or manufactured.

➡️ Audience Insight: The laugh is only the visible reaction — connection is the deeper reward. Humour works because recognizing the same joke can signal that people share an experience, feeling or cultural understanding.

Why This Trend Matters Right Now: Attention Is Becoming Harder to Earn

Brands operate in environments where younger consumers encounter enormous volumes of content and can move past advertising almost instantly. Humour provides one possible route through that attention barrier because it gives audiences something emotionally rewarding before asking anything from them. The India findings — 91% paying closer attention, 88% reporting greater purchase consideration and 93% saying they tell others — demonstrate how powerful that relationship can potentially become.

But those numbers shouldn't be interpreted as simply be funny and consumers will buy. The same research shows how easily humour can fail when brands misunderstand cultural context. The opportunity therefore lies less in producing more jokes and more in understanding the communities, moments and codes that make those jokes meaningful.

ADVERTISING → ATTENTION → MESSAGE

CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING → HUMOUR → CONNECTION → ATTENTION

➡️ Why It Matters: Humour can earn attention because it gives something before it sells something. The consumer gets recognition, entertainment and connection before encountering the commercial message.

Viral Potential: The Best Joke Becomes Social Currency

Humour naturally invites sharing because jokes gain value when they move between people. Sending someone a meme, clip or funny brand post can communicate more than amusement: this reminded me of you, we understand the same thing, or this is exactly what we've been talking about.

That social function helps explain why 93% of India's Next Gen respondents in the study say they tell others about funny brands. Humour gives consumers content that can travel through relationships rather than depending entirely on paid brand distribution.

SEE IT → GET IT → LAUGH → SHARE IT → CONNECT

➡️ Viral Potential: Humour becomes social currency when sharing the joke says something about the relationship between the people sharing it. The strongest funny content doesn't just travel because it is entertaining — it travels because people want someone else to get it too.

Marketing Strategy: Get the Joke

The opportunity isn't to turn every brand into a comedian. It is to understand when humour belongs naturally in the conversation, what cultural codes audiences are using and how a brand can participate without appearing to imitate them.

Strategy Area	Opportunity
Product – Build in Playfulness	Create products, experiences and brand behaviors that naturally give consumers something playful to talk about rather than relying exclusively on humorous advertising.
Pricing – Make Value Feel Lighter	Use appropriate humour to communicate offers and value without turning every price message into purely transactional communication.
Promotion – Speak the Cultural Language	Build humour around recognizable audience experiences and cultural truths rather than simply inserting jokes into conventional advertising.
Distribution – Be Where the Joke Happens	Adapt humour to the platforms, communities and moments where audiences naturally create and share it instead of distributing identical comedy everywhere.
Innovation – Build Cultural Fluency	Develop faster ways to understand changing references, language and audience humor so brands can respond while the cultural moment still matters.

➡️ Strategic Insight: Don't start by asking how the brand can be funny — start by understanding what the audience finds funny and why. Cultural understanding creates the conditions for humour to feel like participation rather than imitation.

Trend Snapshot: When Laughter Creates Connection

Humour is becoming more valuable to brands because its role extends beyond entertainment. For younger consumers, it can provide a shared language for feelings, cultural experiences and relationships.

Trend Dimension	Insight
Broad Trend – Connection	Consumers increasingly value communication that creates emotional and social connection rather than simply delivers information.
Industry Trend – Humour-Led Branding	Brands are using humour as a cultural language capable of generating attention, relatability and conversation with younger audiences.
Lifestyle Trend – Laugh With Me	Younger consumers use shared humour to communicate feelings, navigate serious subjects and connect with people who understand the joke.
Strategy – Get the Joke	Understand the cultural context, timing and meaning behind humour instead of simply trying to make advertising funny.
Consumer Motivation – Show Me You Get Me	Consumers want brands to demonstrate genuine understanding of their experiences, language and cultural references.
Business Opportunity – Turn Laughter Into Connection	Culturally relevant humour can translate attention into stronger consideration, advocacy and participation.
Innovation Outlook – Speak Like the Culture	Brands will need greater cultural fluency and responsiveness as humour becomes faster, more participatory and increasingly defined by communities themselves.

➡️ Trend Snapshot Insight: CONNECTION → HUMOUR-LED BRANDING → LAUGH WITH ME. Humour is becoming more than an entertainment technique — it can function as a shared cultural language through which consumers recognize people and brands that understand their world.

Final Thoughts: The Real Reward Is Being In on the Joke

The next generation isn't simply asking brands to entertain them. Humour can help younger consumers talk about serious subjects, express things they might not otherwise say and signal belonging. As the study puts it, humour has become a language of “belonging, intimacy and even truth,” raising the standard for brands that want to participate.

That means the future of humorous branding is unlikely to be about producing the greatest number of jokes. It will depend on understanding why something is funny, what shared truth sits underneath it and whether the brand has earned a credible place in that conversation.

➡️ Final Insight: Younger consumers are using humour as a language for expressing feelings, sharing experiences and creating connection. Humour-Led Branding gives brands an opportunity to participate in those relationships when they genuinely understand the cultural codes behind the joke. The brands that win won't simply make the next generation laugh — they'll make them feel understood.