Satire Everyday Behaviour

Every category has a behaviour it would rather not acknowledge. The jargon nobody believes. The trend everyone's faking. The ritual that's become hollow. The purchase decision that's stopped making sense. Brands that satirise these things don't just get a laugh — they earn trust, because they're saying what the audience is already thinking. The risk isn't saying it. The risk is saying it badly.

Here are six creative tactics from the Storytelling Engine that know exactly which behaviour to hold up to the light.

1. Satirise the Language of Corporate Culture
2. Push a Financial Behaviour to Its Absurd Limit
3. Mock Your Own Industry's Hype Before Someone Else Does
4. Parody the Ritual of Fan Hypocrisy
5. Satirise Category Complexity to Argue for Simplicity
6. Use the Human Alternative to Deflate the Tech Promise

1. Satirise the Language of Corporate Culture

Find the behaviour everyone in an organisation performs without believing — and name it out loud.

Navigate the Nonsense — HP, Wieden+Kennedy, 2024

HP needed to position its tech solutions as genuinely useful for hybrid work without sounding like every other brand making the same claim in the same breathless language. Wieden+Kennedy's answer was to satirise the source of the problem directly: the CEO. The campaign features over-the-top executive monologues about constantly evolving workplace rules — the kind of solemn, portentous hybrid-work pronouncements that land in all-hands meetings and mean nothing by Thursday. The contrast between the grandiose delivery and the farcical policy content made HP's actual utility land harder than any product demo could.

Globant's Stuck in Consultancy — I, AI (Gut, 2023) applied the same satirical target to the AI gold rush — depicting a cult-like consultancy meeting where agencies obsess over AI without substance, positioning Globant as the brand with a proven track record rather than a trend-chasing pitch. The target in both cases isn't the technology or the product. It's the language used to sell participation in something nobody fully understands.