Marketing can be serious business. Consumer confidence and spending are taking a dip, while businesses are becoming more cautious on investment, leading to increased requirements for differentiation and cut-through. But we don’t always have to be so serious. In 2025, let’s play up the playfulness.

Too often, for brands under pressure the marketing default is to prioritise performance metrics, promotions and transactional messages: buy this, sign up here, visit now. But shouting loudly doesn’t mean your message gets heard above everybody else’s noise.

What’s missing? An emotional, human connection that builds loyalty and makes people genuinely want to interact with your brand. Consumers will always be attracted to deals and offers but to make your brand ‘sticky’ and to ensure the likelihood purchasers will return requires some creativity.

And for marketers, one of the most creative approaches is to be playful. We revel in playfulness, it’s one of our inherent human traits - it’s evident in the Christmas festivities just passed with its tradition of old cracker jokes we love to groan at and our hilarious efforts at charades.

Successful campaigns do need to inspire sales, but they can do this by embracing playful creativity. When the economic circumstances do begin to ease, the brands that brought some light into challenging times will benefit from goodwill and a positive association in people's minds. It’s time to move on from the marketing ‘blandemic’ and have some fun.

The case for playfulness

Inspirational creativity can take many forms and playfulness has just as much power as campaigns focused on evoking sentimental feelings or adrenalin-bursting excitement (like all those computer game ads). A playful campaign with silly creative can be just as memorable, emotional, and action-driven as a serious ad, and innately encourages an authentic connection.

Playfulness is deeply entwined with a tactile experience - even gaming controls use haptics and vibrations to try to bring physical sensations into these digital worlds. The Autumn IPA Bellwether Report showed that events and direct marketing were the biggest beneficiaries in marketer budgets in late 2024. In an increasingly screen-centric world, it’s clear that there’s a hunger for more real world connection with an element of physicality.

Direct mail is one channel that can embrace this tactility and allows customers to touch, feel, and even interact with a brand’s message and it’s generally well-received - the average piece of direct mail gets an impressive 132 seconds of consumer attention. What most brands hunger for.

This attention and engagement combined with clever creative can drive action. A piece of marketing that doubles as a game, a puzzle, or a keepsake has a longer lifespan in the hands and minds of customers. Giving consumers a “brand in the hand” builds deeper emotional connection, activates memory, and turns passive audiences into active participants.

Of course, each time a consumer engages positively with a brand, they are likely to move further along the sales funnel. But brands that can combine play with a strong brand message have a strong chance of capturing attention and converting it to sales.

There have been many inventive approaches to using direct mail. Land Rover for example, made great use of the amusingly creative opportunities offered by mail.

When the car maker launched its newest all-terrain Defender, it wanted to excite existing fans and customers about the model’s all-terrain capabilities. Rather than launch a generic campaign, Land Rover sent customers seemingly blank invitations, decorated with a cracked mud wallpaper and an invitation to “add water to start your Defender experience”.

The water-reactive invitations encouraged recipients to engage with the mail for longer and tapped into their sense of curiosity and joy, eventually revealing a secret test-drive booking form for the new model. Sensory, interactive, and directly linked to a USP, the mischievous campaign exceeded expectations with a 22% response rate, selling 147 cars. Play here led to much more than entertainment, it drove real action.

The joy (and ROI) of humour

In a world where customers are constantly bombarded with sales messages, making them smile is more than a nice-to-have, it’s a proven strategy. A whopping 90% of consumers are more likely to recall a product or brand that they associate with humour, and 80% say that they are more inclined to return to brands they find funny. Why miss an opportunity to build that kind of affinity?

Duolingo is a fabulous example of a brand that has aced the use of humour and surprise effectively. Reminds me, I must take my next Spanish lesson!

Known for its quirky, “unhinged” mascot on TikTok, the brand’s posts constantly subvert expectations and use running jokes to bring fans and followers into an inner circle. In the last three years, its approach has amassed 13.9 million followers on TikTok and contributed to a 150% growth in its subscriber base.

And this tactic doesn’t need to be only digitally-focused. Adding physicality can create magic too. Mail can be integrated into a larger media mix to help amplify the essence of an irreverent brand voice. Toilet paper brand Who Gives A Crap capitalises on cheeky, un-corporate marketing. When targeting prospective customers, the company uses existing data to tailor dry and surprising messages to different archetypes in households that spend the most on FMCG products.

By sending postcards with witty calls to action that combine the company’s eco-friendly purpose with child-like toilet humour, the brand sees serious results. Slogans like “Wipe your bum and change the world” have proven to be a winner, while “The most you’ll think about Toilet Paper” appealed to the brand’s ‘Straight Shooter’ archetype.

Being open, experimental, and playful is what will set successful campaigns apart. Three-quarters of last year’s UK and US Cannes Lions winners leaned into humour to connect with audiences. Why? Because we all value goodwill and a chance to playfully interact and have fun.

Marketing doesn’t have to be serious or overly structured, there are the perfect formats, like direct mail, that provides a perfect canvas for unlimited creativity. So in 2025, let’s unleash our playful side.