What's Happening at Cates Collaborative

If you’re a B2B Marketer wondering if humor has a place in your messaging, stop.  The answer is NO.

Everyone knows that humor is a great way to reach people and make that all-important bond with your audience.  People are just very receptive to the insights and truths that humor brings to a human interaction.

Which is why it absolutely will NOT work in B2B marketing.  No way.  How could it?

You can’t market or communicate to a business the way you would to a person! The thought of it makes me laugh! (But that’s because I’m a person, and people like me do enjoy laughing.)

Businesses are serious places with serious intentions and dire stakes for dire stakeholders. Any attempt to connect with a business via humor would be a tragic mistake.

(There is one exception however, and that is if the business happens to be a company where human people work.  In that rare instance, humor works great.)

But otherwise, a business is not going to get your jokes.  A business is not going to relate to the  emotional connection made through a common pain point or truth that a human being might.  They’re just not built that way.  They’re built to make products and occupy large buildings and buildings do not like to laugh.  They don’t even know how.

(Now, again, if those buildings just happen to be filled with walking, talking, feeling life forms, well that’s a different story. Humor hits right in the feelings and “people” actually respond very well to that.)

But we’re talking about B2B here, not B2CCA (Comedy Club Audience.)

So remember:

1. Businesses don’t laugh. They do business.
2. Humor is for People, with thoughts and feelings.
3. Humor is about nuance, meaning it’s not even always about “jokes” or being “funny,” it’s really about a self-awareness that people really respond to, especially when your marketing shows your understanding and empathy towards their daily challenges and needs. Businesses don’t get nuance, they’re all brick and desk lamps and binder clip trays or whatever.

Actually, It occurred to me that if you are the first “B” in B2B, you are also a business, and so you probably don’t even understand any of what I’ve written here.  That’s my fault.  I should know better.  But since I went through all the trouble, if a human has stumbled upon this article and your business happens to be delivering important messaging to other humans whose business is to care about your message, humor is actually great for that.  Seriously.

Have you ever told what you were certain was an amazing story to an audience that was so unmoved that even the crickets didn’t know how to respond?

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It’s a question I hear all the time, and while it’s a difficult one to answer, I genuinely enjoy trying. I hope you’re reading this because you are interested in using video to promote something, like your brand, a product, some new internal initiatives. Video is great for all of that.

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All of us who consider ourselves to be writers struggle with the same issue: How to go from being just a writer to being a productive writer.

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I’ve made a commitment this year that has served me well so far in my professional and personal life. I have given up the myth of “multitasking.”

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I’m an easy mark for a good “reality” show marathon.  Nothing fuses my pants to a couch on a Sunday more securely than a snackable show running all day long.  One in particular that draws me in is Bar Rescue.

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Expanding our family of branded content offspring…

They grow up so fast. Our partnership with Tomy’s The First Years infant product division has developed from its own infancy 2 years ago into a thriving social media and video campaign that just keeps growing.

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While working on an instructional video project for non-profit Illinois Heart Rescue, Pink Hippo Productions and Cates Collaborative decided that bucket drummers, funky rhythms and hip hop lyrics were essential components to educational messages about treating heart attack victims.

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