WHY FUNCTIONAL
BRANDS CAN’T
CLOSE THE WARMTH GAP. — And the One Structural Move That Does

First, A Distinction That Changes Everything

Before diagnosing the problem, we need to get the language precise. “Warmth,” “likeability” and “playfulness” are not the same thing — conflating them is how functional brands end up chasing the wrong target for years.

Likeability is approval. A brand can be highly likeable without being warm. Monzo is likeable. Its app is fast, its interface is smart, its tone of voice is direct and human. Customers who use it describe it positively. What Monzo has achieved is a Competence upgrade with good taste — it has made a functional product delightful to use. That’s real. But warmth is a different thing entirely, and Monzo hasn’t closed that gap. It’s moved a different dial.

Warmth is something categorically different. It is the sense that a brand has earned the right to exist in your personal life — in the texture of your day, beyond the transaction. It is the quality that makes you describe a brand as human, as being on your side, as something you’d miss if it was gone. Warmth requires emotional permission — the sense that the brand read the room, not just the receipt. And it cannot be engineered through UX. It has to be felt.

The warmth gap is the distance between where a functional brand sits on emotional equity and where customers would need to feel something about it rather than tolerate it, approve of it, or find it competently run. YouGov’s BrandIndex data consistently shows functional category brands scoring at or above parity on trust and quality while scoring well below parity on warmth metrics. The gap isn’t competence. Customers believe their bank is competent. They just don’t feel anything about it. And in categories where product differentiation has effectively collapsed, emotional equity is the last available lever for preference.

Challenger fintechs and digital-native insurers can sidestep the gap entirely, but only if personality is load-bearing from day one. For every brand that institutionalised serious signals for decades, and whose compliance function, legal team and sign-off chain evolved specifically to sand warmth out of every communication, the warmth gap is structural. The machine actively removes it.

The Problem Nobody Names In The Meeting

There’s a specific failure mode that only happens to these brands in serious categories. Financial services. Utilities. Telecoms. Insurance. Household goods. Categories where the product is useful but unloved and where the customer’s dominant emotion toward the brand is mild resentment for existing at all.

These brands know they have a problem. The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer tracks trust in financial services across 28 markets and reports the sector consistently near the bottom for consumer confidence. Kantar’s BrandZ work has flagged for years that meaningful difference in these categories is flat or declining. The prescribed remedy is warmth. Become more human. Lean into personality. Show up like a person.

The problem is that when a bank tries to show up like a person, it shows up like your dad doing a TikTok dance. We all know the reference. We’ve all felt the second-hand embarrassment watching a pension provider attempt banter on social. The question nobody asks is why it happens so reliably. Why can Innocent make a joke when Lloyds can’t? Why does Oatly get away with things that would sink Barclays?

The reflexive answer is that Innocent is “a playful brand” and Lloyds isn’t. But that’s the outcome, not the explanation. The real answer is structural. Comedy is a register that requires a stable comic identity underneath it. Innocent has one. Lloyds doesn’t. A brand without a comic identity attempting comedy reads as a try-hard, because the audience can feel the gap between what the brand structurally is and what it’s performing.

The academic literature is unambiguous on this. Martin Eisend’s meta-analysis of 369 correlations on humour in advertising found something that should make every CMO pause. Humour reliably enhances attention and positive affect toward the ad itself. What it does not reliably do is improve liking of the advertiser. The analysis found no evidence that humour improves how consumers feel about the brand running the ad — and found that humour actively reduces source credibility.

The difference runs deeper than stakes. The kind of credibility being spent is different. When Liquid Death or Oatly behave irreverently, the credibility in play is taste — whether you find them cool or annoying. When a bank behaves irreverently, the credibility in play is fiduciary judgment. Customers need to believe their bank makes serious decisions about serious things. A brand that signals it doesn’t take itself seriously is, at some level, signalling it might not take your money seriously either. That is a rational inference drawn from observed brand character to assumed business conduct. The decay matters more because the thing being eroded is the core product promise, not a style choice.

Oatly’s CEO, in a field, singing off-key about oat milk. The brand doesn’t flinch because the comic identity was built in before the brief existed. The budget could exist at any legacy bank. The identity couldn’t.

What Halifax Proved — And What It Proved Next

Before writing off functional brands entirely, it’s worth looking at the one time a British bank came close. In the early 2000s, Halifax ran a campaign featuring Howard Brown, a real branch employee, singing pop songs with earnest sincerity. “Howard” became one of the most recognised advertising characters in British marketing history. The campaign ran for years. The brand’s warmth scores moved.

It is worth understanding precisely why it worked, because the reason is directly relevant to everything that follows. Howard Brown wasn’t performing comedy. He was performing sincerity. A bank clerk, treating a pop song with the same straight-faced institutional gravity he presumably brought to mortgage applications. The humour came entirely from the contrast between the register (a pop performance) and the subject (a deeply functional man in a bank). Halifax was the straight man. Howard was the straight man. Nobody winked. And the result was genuinely charming.

The mechanic was correct. The problem was what Halifax did with it next.

Once the campaign worked, the brand thought it began to understand its own formula, which was the beginning of the end. Subsequent iterations became more self-aware. The casting changed. The format evolved toward performance rather than sincerity. The campaign, which had worked precisely because it wasn’t trying to be funny, started trying to be funny. The warmth evaporated because the straight-man mechanic requires the straight man to not know he’s the straight man. The moment Halifax recognised what it was doing, the thing it was doing stopped working.

This is the cautionary half of the Howard Brown story and it matters as much as the proof-of-concept half. Warmth generated in-house by a functional brand is not durable. The institutional pressures that pushed Halifax to optimise, iterate and eventually self-consciously produce warmth are the same pressures acting on every functional brand in a marketing meeting right now. The machine that builds the campaign is also the machine that kills it.

The Celebrity Loophole — And Why It Closes

There is an obvious counter-argument here. What about celebrity? Brands in functional categories buy warmth via talent all the time. They sign warm, funny, beloved public figures and some of that warmth transfers to the brand. This is a real mechanism with a real name — borrowed interest — and it genuinely works in the short term. So why isn’t it the answer?

Borrowed interest in action. The warmth is real — but it belongs to the talent, not the brand. When the contract ends, it walks out the door with them.

The answer is in the word “borrowed.” Borrowed interest is a transactional purchase of association. The brand is not acquiring a personality. It is renting one. And when the contract ends, the talent moves on, becomes inconvenient or simply becomes expensive — the warmth leaves the building with them. The brand has not changed. It has temporarily occupied a warmer position than it earned and the moment the tenancy expires, it reverts.

Gwinner and Eaton’s research on sponsorship image transfer demonstrates that personality attributes do genuinely transfer from associated properties to brands. But the same body of work implies the corollary: when the association ends, the transfer reverses. What the brand built during the association is goodwill toward the campaign, not equity in the brand. These are not the same asset.

Compare this to the structural alternative. A brand that acts as the institutional patron of a format — that sponsors something, runs it with full gravity and treats it as a serious cultural institution — is not borrowing warmth. It is accumulating it. Every year the format runs, the brand’s patronage deepens. The format becomes associated with the brand in a way that a celebrity never can be, because the brand holds it and is responsible for its existence. The warmth is proprietary, not rented.

The Register Nobody Uses

There is a comedic register that almost nobody in brand strategy talks about. Tone of voice has nothing to do with it. This is structural — and it is the only register a functional brand can occupy without eroding its own credibility.

Consider the Ig Nobel Prizes. Since 1991, the Annals of Improbable Research has held an annual ceremony awarding genuine scientific research for being simultaneously improbable and making people laugh, then think. The ceremony is co-hosted by actual Nobel laureates. Acceptance speeches are capped at 60 seconds by an eight-year-old called Miss Sweetie Poo, who interrupts anyone who runs over. Research on topics like the aerodynamic properties of dead ducks, or whether cats behave as both solids and liquids, is presented with full academic gravity.

The humour comes from the straight-faced institutional treatment of absurd subject matter. The format is funny. The institution is being exactly, precisely, relentlessly itself — and the contrast does all the work.

The same mechanic powers the World Gravy Wrestling Championships in Bacup. The Cooper’s Hill Cheese Rolling event. The World Stone Skimming Championships on Easdale. Finland’s wife-carrying contest. None of these events are trying to be funny. They are trying to be taken seriously. The seriousness is the comedy. The judges genuinely judge. The trophies are genuinely awarded. The participants genuinely compete. And the audience finds it charming precisely because nobody is winking.

This is the oldest mechanic in comedy. The straight man. The stable pole that makes the joke legible. Remove the straight man and absurdity collapses into noise. Keep the straight man and the absurdity has something to push against. Morecambe needed Wise. The Ig Nobels need their Nobel laureates. Gravy wrestling needs a panel of serious judges in shirts.

This is also, exactly, what Halifax’s Howard Brown campaign did — without knowing it was doing it. A bank clerk, treating a pop song with total institutional seriousness. The bank was the straight man. The format was the joke. Nobody tried to be funny. And it worked.

The mechanic still works. What Halifax couldn’t do — and what every functional brand faces — is sustain it deliberately. Halifax stumbled into it, then optimised it to death. The question for any functional brand now is whether the mechanic can be deployed at commercial scale, in a format the brand owns rather than performs. The answer is yes. But it requires a very specific structural approach.

Why This Works When In-House Humour Doesn’t

There are three structural reasons sponsoring an absurd format outperforms in-house playfulness for functional brands. They compound.

First, the brand never has to perform a register it can’t hold. Humour is high-risk creative territory and the margin for error is narrow. Sponsoring a format that is already funny transfers the creative risk to the format and away from the brand’s own voice. Jennifer Aaker’s foundational work on brand personality established that brands have stable personality dimensions — Sincerity, Excitement, Competence, Sophistication and Ruggedness — and that violating those dimensions produces consumer dissonance. A functional brand attempting in-house humour is reaching for Excitement while its Competence dimension is the thing customers hired it for. The same brand sponsoring an absurd format with full institutional gravity is not violating its Competence dimension at all. It is expressing it in an unexpected context — which is precisely the straight-man mechanic.

Second, the audience assigns the warmth to the brand anyway. This is the part that feels counterintuitive until it is working. When a serious brand takes something unserious seriously, the audience does not read the brand as dull. They read it as being in on it — as having enough confidence in its own identity to indulge something absurd without being diminished by it. Gwinner and Eaton’s work on sponsorship image transfer demonstrates empirically that sponsored events transfer personality attributes to sponsoring brands. Later work by Gwinner, Larson and Swanson confirmed the transfer predicts purchase intentions in real-world settings. The warmth of the format moves to the brand without the brand having to manufacture it.

Third, the format insulates the brand from its own failure modes. If a bank’s in-house content misfires, the bank owns the cringe. If the same bank sponsors an event and someone finds the event rather than the sponsor underwhelming, the brand is insulated by its distance from the creative. This inverts the risk profile that most brand managers instinctively fear about unusual sponsorships. The unusual sponsorship is actually the safer creative bet, because the downside is bounded.

The Format As A Worked Example

The National Pillow Fort Championship is a competitive comfort format built around one central idea: take something nobody treats seriously, treat it with complete institutional gravity and let the contrast produce the charm.

Teams design and construct pillow forts under timed conditions. Judging panels assess architectural integrity, interior design, comfort performance, aesthetic entryway design and defensive viability. The judging is rigorous. The trophy looks like something from the Royal Academy. The event is presented with the same production weight you’d expect from a national sporting final.

None of this is ironic. That is the entire point. Irony is the failure mode — the moment anyone involved winks at the camera, the format collapses into a sketch. The rigour is what protects the format and, by extension, the brand that sponsors it.

The format has two strategic layers. The obvious one: competitive comfort is inherently shareable, photogenic and ownable in a category nobody currently owns, because nobody currently thinks to compete in it. The less obvious one: competitive comfort is quiet commentary on burnout culture. It is a championship of rest, of softness and of permission to retreat into the thing every adult secretly wants and feels vaguely embarrassed to admit they want. Treated ceremonially, it becomes a piece of cultural observation rather than a piece of whimsy.

For a brand selling home insurance, broadband, energy, mattresses or any household service tied to the home as a site of rest and retreat, the format is not a stretch. It is a straight line from product truth to cultural moment. The brand gets to be the serious institutional patron of a serious championship of something the category is already implicitly about. No humour required. No tone of voice shift. No risk of cringe. Just the brand being exactly itself — in a context that makes it culturally warm by association and that it owns rather than rents.

The National Pillow Fort Championship. Built like a sporting institution. Held ready for a headline sponsor.

The Ceiling — And Why It Doesn’t Move

Functional brands cannot generate warmth internally without eroding credibility.

Not struggle to. Cannot. The Eisend meta-analysis is unambiguous — humour generated by the brand enhances attention toward the ad but does not improve liking of the advertiser and actively reduces source credibility. Aaker’s framework explains why. A functional brand’s Competence dimension is the product it is selling. Attempting in-house humour reaches for Excitement while spending down Competence — which the brand has no prior permission to do and which the customer did not ask for. The customer doesn’t read this as range. They read it as the brand becoming less credible at the thing they hired it to do.

The ceiling is structural — and structural ceilings don’t yield to better executions. It does not yield to better copy, sharper creative direction, a new social team, a funnier agency or a brand voice workshop. The warmth gap has widened in functional categories even as spend on humanisation has increased, because every attempt to push through the ceiling from inside the brand generates precisely the credibility decay the research predicts.

Accept the constraint and the next move follows cleanly. If warmth cannot be generated internally, it must be imported. If it must be imported, the only mechanism that imports it without asking the brand to change its voice is sponsorship image transfer. And if the brand is relying on image transfer, the choice of format is no longer a media decision or a reach decision. It is the entire strategy. The format is doing the work the brand cannot do for itself.

That narrows the question in a way most brand managers have not understood they should be asking. Not “how do we become warmer.” But: which external format can carry warmth into our brand without asking us to be something we are not? The answer is a very short list, because almost no available sponsorship properties are designed for this purpose.

Why The Available Options Don’t Work

Look at what functional brands currently buy when they buy sponsorship. Premier League football. Rugby. Test cricket. The Olympics. Formula 1. Music festivals. Awards ceremonies. These properties are large, legible and mass-reach. They also transfer attributes that functional brands already have: Competence, prestige, discipline, reliability and institutional weight. A bank sponsoring a Premier League club is buying more of what it already is. Nothing in that transaction moves the warmth dial. The brand ends the sponsorship exactly as warm as it started.

The properties that could close the warmth gap, by contrast, barely exist as commercial assets. Cooper’s Hill cheese rolling is not sponsored. The World Stone Skimming Championships is not sponsored at scale. Gravy wrestling in Bacup happens because a pub runs it. These formats carry exactly the warmth a functional brand needs to import — and every one of them is commercially unavailable or too small to absorb a national brand’s budget. The supply of sponsor-ready absurd formats in the UK is approximately zero.

The gap isn’t creative. Brands know what they need. The problem is that the thing capable of delivering it doesn’t exist as something they can buy off a rate card. The market has a hole on both sides: brands that need warmth with nowhere to import it from, and formats capable of generating warmth with no infrastructure to license them at commercial scale.

Closing that hole requires a specific capability that does not sit naturally inside any existing agency model. Brand strategy consultancies sell tone of voice and positioning — a format sponsorship play makes their core deliverable irrelevant. Media agencies trade in existing inventory. Experiential agencies execute against briefs rather than originate IP. Creative agencies come closest, but their commercial model rewards campaign billing rather than the long development cycles required to build a format, seed it culturally and license it to sponsors over years. Nobody in the conventional agency landscape is structurally incentivised to build the thing functional brands need.

The Real LOL Club is built for exactly this. The entire architecture — identity, hook, creators, brand integration and moment — as set out in From Targeting To Belonging, is a capability designed to originate and operate formats that close the warmth gap without asking the sponsoring brand to change its voice. The National Pillow Fort Championship is one format held ready for a headline sponsor. The Celebration of Ordinary and The National Bad Decisions Awards are others in the same register, solving the same structural problem for different brand types. The full catalogue spans every angle at which the straight-man mechanic can be commercially mounted — and each format is built to flex around the sponsoring brand rather than asking the brand to flex around it.

The only remaining variable is which brand in each category moves first — and which ones spend another year funding work that cannot succeed.