Attempting an April Fools’ Day prank with your business can be risky
Posted April 1, 2016 3:49 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – It’s been a tough day for Google, which is dealing with public relations nightmare caused by its April Fools’ Day prank. It may have you wondering if crafting a corporate joke to play is worth the trouble.
There’s a lot that can go wrong, as Google learned when it switched out the archive button in the Gmail interface with one called mic drop, which sends your email with a GIF of a minion from the movie “Despicable Me” actually dropping a microphone and turns off notifications for replies.
Some people accidentally sent professional emails that way and the Internet was very angry.
Comments flooded Gmail’s help forum. One person claimed he lost his job over the inappropriate communication he sent. Google had to issue and apology and retracted the joke button.
April Fool’s pranks in the business world are fine and can be fun, but there’s a fine line between funny and harmful, says SFU Marketing Professor Lindsay Meredith.
He suggests you test out your idea on a sampling of customers first before you launch it April 1st.
“You’ve got to sit down and really work it through and always, always, rule one in marketing… you go out and you try it on a couple customers first and see what happens. Give it a limited shot and if you get that push back, you know you’re on the wrong track.”
He says it would be awful to lose any customers over an April Fool’s prank.
“Whenever you start to play with April Fool’s jokes, you do risk the possibility somebody’s going to take it for real and at that point, you’re going to have a little pushback and maybe some cleaning up to do.”
