Today in Digital Marketing - How to Reply to Angry Comments with Humour — And Not F**k It Up

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello, hello, it's Todd Maffin. As you probably know by now, this week we are doing a full week of deep dive interviews with senior digital marketing practitioners and marketing scientists. Today's episode is a great one. It is about the appropriate humor to use on your brand's social media channels when someone complains. I think you'll find a lot of value here if you do any social media engagement for your brand. Today's episode is most but not all of our chat. Premium members are getting the full 24-minute long interview. Okay, onward. Our agency is an engagement and moderation shop. All we do is engagement on brands' channels.

Starting point is 00:00:43 When someone sends a DM or posts a question or tweets a complaint or whatever, it's someone on my team that replies as the brand. One of the things we do when we first take on a client is to try to understand the brand's personality. How much latitude we have with the voice and tone. Some brands, like an airline brand we work with, want absolutely no humor. But another client has an account specifically for its stuffed animal mascots, and that one we have free reign on. The real challenge, though, is figuring out what to say and how much humor to use. We can't all be like some fast food brands who seem to have hired actual comedians to reply to people. The use of humor in social media is a double-edged sword.

Starting point is 00:01:21 But luckily, we now have a bit of science to help out. In this case, parents, some of this science contains bad words. You have been warned. Mathieu Bial is an assistant professor of marketing at Grenoble Ecole de Management in France. He and his colleagues have just published a paper in the Journal of Interactive Marketing called Using Humour to Address Complainers Online in Civility.

Starting point is 00:01:46 He joins me now from his office in the French Alps. Dr. Bial, welcome. And I am not at all jealous that you are in the French Alps. Hello, Todd. Was there much research on the use of humor on social media prior to your investigation? So there was not that much research on humor. We already published one paper with one of my colleagues about it. But now it's getting more and more. There are more and more research on that. But most of this research are about answering to positive comments, for instance, but there was no research on complaints, answering to complaints,

Starting point is 00:02:25 because it's such a specific context that I think researchers were very afraid of trying to see if humor could be interesting in this specific context. So what did you set out to study then? So we tried to understand the condition and the circumstances that makes humor funny, because as you said, it's a double-edged sword. So we assume that it could turn into something very positive for the brand in terms of brand image and repurchase intention from observers. So when I talk about observers, I'm talking about customers while not the complainers

Starting point is 00:03:00 by itself, but people would just see the interaction from an external perspective. So we assume that it could be beneficial for the brand, but if it's not used in the perfect condition, then it could turn into a bad buzz and generate a very bad situation for the company. You did a few different tests. Can you walk us through, there's one in particular that I thought was kind of interesting. If you could explain this test, that you had participants imagine that they had moved to a new city and needed a new internet provider. Yes. Yeah. So what we did is that we asked people to imagine a situation. So basically we did some, what we call the scenario-based experiments just to control the phenomenon. And we asked people, just imagine that you are looking for a new internet service provider

Starting point is 00:03:47 and you start looking at some information on social media like Twitter. And usually people, this is what they do in real life, that they look at the customer's opinions on Google or on social media. And most of the time they use complaints because it's a good indication of how bad the company could be. And after showing a customer complaining, we show a company answering with humor. And we asked people how they perceive this move from the company. And basically what we did is that we compared two situations. One situation where the customer was complaining by being very polite and another situation where this

Starting point is 00:04:27 exact same complaint was done in a very uncivil way. So we include insults, we include exclamation marks, it was written in capital letters. And the company's humor was the same. We didn't change the humor used by the brand.

Starting point is 00:04:43 And at the end, what we show is that people who see the humorous response in the uncivil context, they consider that the response was funnier and they present higher purchase intention compared to the people who were exposed to the civil context condition. Higher purchase intent. Interesting. So, yeah, exactly. Basically, we asked two questions, to be honest. First, we asked the purchase intention. We asked them, okay, after seeing that, would you be willing to purchase in this brand?

Starting point is 00:05:17 But we also asked them if they would retreat or like the company's post. So, basically, we measured the engagement on social media. And again, we found that people will be more prone to like and share the company's response when it's used to answer to an uncivil complaint. Did you test whether or not or how the data changed when the fictional company just literally ignored the complaint? Yes, that was our control condition, because we want to show that humor is efficient because it's humor, not just because it's a response.

Starting point is 00:05:55 So we look at what is the effect of not answering. And what we show is that people are more, they like more a company, no matter the company response or not, just because the company is uncivil. Because people don't like uncivil complaints. So they don't use an uncivil complaint as a valuable source of information. So all things being equal, actually uncivil complaints are not that dangerous because people are like, okay, this person is very rude. So I'm not going to listen to their opinion. The thing is that you can increase this positive effect by using humor. So even if we have this effect just by not answering, if you answer, and if you answer by using humor, you can make this effect stronger and people will purchase way more than if you don't answer. Well, one of your other tests I thought was particularly entertaining.

Starting point is 00:06:53 You showed your participants a fake tweet to a fictional pizza restaurant. Parents, you know the bad words. That fictional tweet said, fuck, it's been an hour. I have been waiting for my goddamn pizza you bastards will it be fucking longer so a couple of things first of all most entertaining thing i've ever read in an academic paper for one so kudos secondly one reply um that you did you tested a couple of different replies from the brand yes one reply was accommodating right so? So it said, we'll do our best to deliver it as soon as possible. We are sincerely sorry for the inconvenience. Probably the way a lot of

Starting point is 00:07:29 brands would choose to reply. Yeah, exactly. It's the classic response. Exactly. Yeah. Another went comedy and picked up on the, will it be fucking longer line and replied with, no, it will be rounder. Again, it's a pizza restaurant, which I thought was great. And then the third option was one where the pizza place just ignored the complaint and didn't reply. What did you learn there? So here it was very important for us to compare the humorous response with something like the traditional response, like being very accommodative. So when the company apologizes. So it was very important to compare these two strategies because most, as you say, most companies, they use this traditional way by apologizing. And what we show here is that when the customer is very polite, so not in the situation that you read, in this situation, it's more interesting to be accommodative. Because as I mentioned earlier,

Starting point is 00:08:26 humor is not very interesting to answer to a civil person. So in that case, it's better to be accommodative. Now, what we show is that when we go to the uncivil condition, so when we see how people react to a company answering in a funny way to someone being very rude, here humor is way more efficient than being accommodative. So basically, they present the similar purchase intention, but they engage way more.

Starting point is 00:08:55 So the company is rewarded by having the same purchase intention from these customers, but they can create a positive buzz on social media, which they cannot do with an accommodative recovery. Because when you just say, I apologize, people don't interact with these basic tweets. I know you didn't study this in particular, but I'm curious how you would,

Starting point is 00:09:18 what your gut tells you on how a brand would come up with the jokes, I guess is my question, right? Aside from hiring a comedian, creating a comedic reply to a very angry customer while your research shows that it increases purchase intent when it's a particularly egregiously uncivil comment directed at the brand, that can backfire. And there are countless examples on social media. In fact, I think in your abstract, you point to one where it was a train company,

Starting point is 00:09:50 a real world trade company that tried to reply and ended up accidentally sort of insulting women drivers or something. How does a brand get humor appropriately and still be brand safe? So I think, and that's what makes humor very interesting to study. You can't be sure before doing the joke that it will work. I think we've all been through this situation where we tell someone a joke and it fell flat because it was not as funny. I mean, we have been through this situation. And this is what makes humor so interesting to study as a researcher, because you can have some idea about situation that increase the success of humor, but in the end, you never know if it will be a 100% chance of success. So this is what happened with this example that you mentioned. It was a woman complaining about, I think it was one of the managers of a train company who called her honey. And she complained about that.

Starting point is 00:10:50 She said, that's so sexist to call a woman honey when you don't know her. And the company answered by saying, oh, would you like us to call you pet or love? And it didn't work because it was considered as a sexist joke. And it doesn't work. Like at least bounce it off people in the office, I guess, first is probably good advice. In your paper, you said, we note no significant difference between affiliative humor and the absence of response conditions regarding the score on accommodative recovery. Can you explain that in non-science language for us? And does it mean that there's no difference between making a joke

Starting point is 00:11:29 and just straight up ignoring the complaint? So it doesn't make a difference when the complaint is civil. So when someone is being very polite, there is no debate. You should just answer by being accommodative. So apologizing, providing a compensation, whatever, like the traditional way to answer to customers' complaints. Now, going back to the comparison between humor and non-response, not responding, what we show here is that in this specific context, humor is as inefficient as not answering at all, which is like the worst approach,

Starting point is 00:12:06 not answering and ignoring customers' complaints is something you should not do. So in this civil context, we show that humor is so bad that even not answering is as efficient as this. But then things change in the uncivil context. And then this is the context where humor is having a lot of potential. In our full conversation, we talked about the effect on softer metrics like brand perception, the use of memes instead of jokes, what the perfect comedic reply structure looks like, whether specific industries or platforms are immune to this effect, how benign violation theory applies to tweeting a funny reply, and more.

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Today in Digital Marketing - How to Reply to Angry Comments with Humour — And Not F**k It Up

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