Marketing for Men Who May Find It Hard to Man-Up
Humour in advertising is a great way to go. It isn’t easy to get right and the person viewing or reading it has to have a sense of humour. But what happens when the subject you are dealing with isn’t funny in the slightest? What if the subject has to do with a decision that could keep the reader alive or send them to their grave if they ignore it? Would you poke fun at it?
Subject dealing with life or death usually refers to something to do with mental or physical health. The big C gets a lot of attention when it comes to raising awareness about early prevention and screening to catch the beast early. It is a deadly serious matter and yet a lot of the advertising around screenings for prostate cancer has a humorous side.
From lines like ‘is there a finger famous enough to get you tested?’ with a series of images of index fingers of famous fictional characters pointing up, to ones that tell men to ‘Man-Up: Get Your Prostate Screened.’ These kinds of campaigns play on all butch notions men were brought up on. And then there are ads that play on the word ‘ball,’ like ‘have you got the balls to check your prostate?’ And there is more humour centred around how going to get a prostate screening proves you are a real man with the line ‘real men protect their assets.’
So, marry that with ‘boys will be boys’ and ‘men don’t cry’ and there you have it, a society that will bully men into action just to prove they are one of the lads and nothing can phase them.
If so, why is it that over three out of four suicides are by men and suicide is the biggest cause of death for men under 35, according to the Office for National Statistics in Great Britain for 2016? Why are 12.5% of men in the UK suffering from a common mental health disorder? Perhaps because men have been brought up to keep all their emotions bottled up inside and it is shameful to actually seek help. They go to pubs, drink beer, watch football matches, and everything else to camouflage their inner turmoil.
That being that, is poking fun at their manhood and poking them into getting poked in areas of their body that may not be considered manly at all considered alright? Sure, just as alright as it was in the 60s to advertise that a woman’s place is in the kitchen, or it was alright for a husband to spank his wife from time to time.
It is an extremely judgmental world out there and men deserve to be able to show their emotions just as openly as women do without being ridiculed and without playing it out as a joke. Use humour in advertising, and get a chuckle out of the audience but consider the mental repercussions it may have.
There is a fine line between laughing and crying and being considerate and poking fun. We aren’t expected to get it right every time but if we start our marketing efforts with the realisation that we are talking to real human beings, we are halfway there.
