What’s been one of the best parts about writing a daily blog?

Making a ton of friends who see the world through a marketing lens, and send pictures and screenshots for me to create posts around them!

One such friend and subscriber is Morgan Mudge, who founded a giving app for churches and is now leading a Church Management Software company, as well.

Morgan often sends me interesting images to see how I will craft manna out of these and I always reply with the most Barney Stinson-ish response ever – “Challenge accepted!”

So, in appreciation of all those who send screenshots for use in my daily blog, this week, I’m going to share a post a day around images that Morgan has been sending me.

And this is the most appropriate one to kick things off this Monday, because half my conversations with Morgan are filled with humor.

In fact, humor is the most underrated weapon in marketing.

It brings down walls and defenses even when something goes wrong.

This could be because it takes only 17 muscles to smile, but 43 muscles to frown.

That’s probably why Ryanair managed to get away with this terrible response to one customer’s service complaint.

Ryanair is one of the world’s largest low-cost carriers and hence, gets a lot of customer complaints daily.

But, they’ve realized that a far more popular and profitable defense mechanism is to respond with humor and engage personally, rather than just professionally.

Sure, they will have to ensure the customer complaint is handled properly.

But doing it with a smile makes it less painful for the prospect, which always ends up being more profitable for Ryanair.