Why April Fools’ Day is so hard for brands to get right

Scott Monty, a marketing consultant who achieved a degree of industry fame during his six years manning Ford’s social media accounts, never got to make an April Fools’ Day joke. 

Ford considered its brand — dependable, solid — above such frivolity.

More than once, Monty tells Mashable, the automaker’s social media team submitted an April Fools’ Day pitch for approval, and each time, it was nixed by someone higher up.

“This is Ford. We’re not funny,” he said, jokingly summing up the attitude of his former bosses. “And everybody would go, ‘Yeah, don’t we know it.’”

Ford CEO Mark Fields sits in the 2017 Lincoln Navigator with gullwing doors at the 2016 New York International Auto Show at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City, NY, USA, on March 23, 2016. Photo by Dennis Van Tine/Sipa USA

“Everybody has a different sense of humor”

“Humor is one of the most difficult things to nail as far as a brand goes,” says Monty.

“Everybody has a different sense of humor,” he continues. “There’s some people who appreciate sarcasm, some people who have a very dry sense of humor, some people who appreciate slapstick. So creating a single one-off for April Fools’ Day means that you have to take all of that into account. And maybe it doesn’t hit any of those types of humor. It’s a bit of a crapshoot.”

It’s the philosophy of April Fool’s Day: Trust no one and question everything.

The annual bacchanal of marketing gimmickry that is April Fools’ Day somehow grows bigger each year despite the fact that nobody seems to like this terrible holiday all that much.

Nobody, that is, besides the hundreds of corporations and advertisers that spend the day pouring money and brainpower into gleefully lying to their customers. The same customers, as it happens, whose trust they spend every other day of the year trying to win.

It’s usually in good fun, of course — who doesn’t appreciate a well-executed practical joke? And it gives brands the rare chance to show off a sense of humor, appear relatable and get some guaranteed free press.

But it also makes one wonder why normally public relations-skittish companies take such delight in being associated with a day of lies, deception and manipulation.

Humor is hard for brands

For one thing, pulling off the perfect prank is no easy feat for a brand trying to appeal to a wide swathe of the population. 

The most successful ones have to walk a line somewhere between nefarious sabotage and yawn-inducing predictability. 

They need to come off as playful and mischievous without causing any serious offense — or even the feeling that the brand is laughing at rather than with the customer.

Oh, and somewhere in there, they need to work in a reason why these little tricks should actually make people want their product.

All told, that leaves a lot of space for even a well-meaning hoax — if such a thing exists — to fly off the rails and land in a pit of social media umbrage.

The fool’s cap is not for every brand

Apple — which famously has about as much zeal for public transparency as the Soviet Kremlin — notably sits the day out each year as chief rival Google and the rest of its Silicon Valley cohort revel in the geeky whimsy they like to project.

With the exception of the more established tech brands, last year’s list was also decidedly light on stodgier, more staid giants of corporate America.

Anne McGill, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business whose research delves into what happens when people anthropomorphize corporate brands, might have an explanation as to why. 

At a subconscious level, she says, brands that dupe their customers — even in service of the lighthearted occasion — risk planting seeds of distrust.

“No one likes to be teased,” McGill says. “If the brand seems to be having fun at your expense, I could easily see it feeling like a violation of trust.”

Oftentimes, an April Fools’ Day stunt can amount to a fleeting short-term gain in the form of buzzy media attention that comes at the expense of a potential longer term reputation, McGill said.

“At the heart of that is that thinking that branding is only about brand awareness — as in ‘Oh yeah I’ve heard of you’ — and not thinking that branding goes beyond that to a set of things people believe about the brand and feel about the brand,” she says. 

April Disruption Day

That said, when a brand’s persona does jibe with a spirit of foolishness, there’s nothing wrong with playing the fool for a day. Particularly well-suited, it seems, are tech companies, which often like to be seen as endearingly quirky and project a gee-whiz aura of technical mystery that suggests they are at the cutting edge of innovation. 

For them, April Fools’ Day is right in line with those sensibilities — what’s more “disruptive” than a cleverly conceived practical joke?

Not to mention, as Mashable has previously pointed out, it’s a fun way to divert attention from some of their less charming qualities.

A case in point is Google, which has become notorious for its yearly pranks and usually plants several of them at a time.But perhaps the best testament to the marketing power of April Fools’ Day is that despite those risks, brands continue to double down on it every year. 

Already in the two days leading into the joke-fest, at least a handful of major brands have already emptied their comedic arsenals early.

If their enthusiasm is any indication, this Friday going to be as full of advertising lies and hoaxes as ever.

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