Brands and April Fool's

In a time like it is, speaking economically, I appreciate a brand’s effort to a smile on the face of its consumers, or those people like me who might not be a direct consumer, but appreciate all things branding, marketing, and PR related. I’m talking about April Fool’s jokes.

I pulled up Gmail to log on this morning, as I do first thing every morning, to see the Gmail Autopilot blurb. I quickly skimmed it, as I do with most things that I see around the 8:30 a.m. hour when I’m trying to read my morning news before opening up my work email in an effort to put off the barrage of emails that will be waiting for me to respond to. Point being, my first thought with the Gmail Autopilot was, “well that’s kind of cool I guess, but I don’t think I’d ever use that.” My second thought being, “Man, how lazy are we really getting if we have an auto-response for every email that graces our inbox?”

Now don’t get me wrong. I could definitely use an auto-response for those emails I try to ignore until I can’t ignore responding to them any longer. Not that I make a habit of this! I’m typically a speedy responder. But how about all of the spam that I’ve been getting recently. I don’t know what list my name got on, but I’m not really in the need for any of the products these spam emails are trying to sell me. Back to my thoughts about this “new” Gmail product. Call me gullible; which I probably can be, but I didn’t actually get that it was an April Fool’s joke at first. I guess this can also be blamed on the fact that I’ve never pulled my own April Fool’s prank, and by the fact that I completely forgot today was April Fool’s Day!

It all changed when I hopped on good old Twitter and saw folks tweeting about Google’s April Fool’s joke. With all of the interesting Google Labs items that are always being developed I cut myself a little slack on not picking up on this joke. Hey, this could be a cool, if incredibly antisocial, but sometimes helpful (reference spam), tool to have at times.

Adfreak highlighted some of the other brands with April Fool’s jokes out there today on their blog: read the post here. Thanks to these brands and others who’ve put smiles upon our faces with a little April Fool’s Day fun. We needed it!