Here’s a look at two major tax prepa­ra­tion brands and their strate­gies for the 2015 tax sea­son.

The Fun/Humorous Approach: H&R Block

For its part, tax prep brand H&R Block cre­at­ed a series of videos with actor George Takei that takes a humor­ous look at the com­plex­i­ty of the tax code, Odes to the Code.

Accord­ing to Kel­li Ramey, H&R Block’s vice pres­i­dent of adver­tis­ing, social and cre­ative ser­vices, the series was an idea the brand came up with to poke fun at the tax code while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly demon­strat­ing H&R Block’s exper­tise.

Fur­ther, as of March 30, which is when H&R Block post­ed the videos, Ramey notes one-third of Amer­i­cans still had not filed their tax­es.

“There are dif­fer­ent rea­sons peo­ple wait, but one we hear is about com­plex­i­ty, so we decid­ed, ‘Let’s just go with the code,’” Ramey said. “It’s such a bizarre and obscure lan­guage and we know it, so that’s why we decid­ed to [do] some­thing [that demon­strates] we’re proud of what we know.”

H&R Block chose to release all of the videos at once because they’re fun to watch as a series and “they’re so sil­ly that you watch one and then want to see anoth­er,” she adds.

Per YouTube, the five videos gen­er­at­ed about 18,000 views.

“Our social strat­e­gy is about inform­ing and enter­tain­ing,” Ramey said. “It’s not a top­ic peo­ple get excit­ed about, but there are so many inter­est­ing pieces of it. We’re giv­ing tips, help­ful infor­ma­tion, cus­tomer service…and some of it is about hav­ing fun with diff bits of tax code…the idea of tax­es feels icky, but it touch­es every sin­gle one of us and our per­son­al lives, so we attack it with humor.”

The cam­paign also includes a 15-sec­ond online spot the brand used in pre-roll and online buys and Takei has also post­ed the videos to his 1.6 mil­lion Twit­ter fol­low­ers.

The Calming/Comforting Approach: TurboTax

For its part, Tur­b­o­Tax asked con­sumers to share pho­tos on Insta­gram or Twit­ter with the hash­tag #File­andSmile to demon­strate “how they felt when they filed their tax­es.”

Per Chris­tine Mor­ri­son, group man­ag­er of social strat­e­gy and dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tions at Tur­b­o­Tax par­ent Intu­it, about 1,000 peo­ple had sub­mit­ted images as of April 10.

The brand has also made a con­cert­ed effort to ensure it is avail­able to answer con­sumers’ tax ques­tions.

“Each year we see ever more con­sumers turn to social media plat­forms like Face­book and Twit­ter for help with ques­tions about their tax­es. We have a ded­i­cat­ed group of cus­tomer care agents who are spe­cial­ly trained to delight cus­tomers in these medi­ums,” Mor­ri­son said. “Even though some of the most dif­fi­cult cas­es arise in social chan­nels, the social care team has the high­est cus­tomer rec­om­men­da­tion rate of any care team across the entire Tur­b­o­Tax orga­ni­za­tion – because they don’t stop at resolv­ing questions…their goal is turn­ing peo­ple into Tur­b­o­Tax pro­mot­ers.”

In addi­tion, she said “it’s all hands on deck” dur­ing the final days of tax sea­son in which “lead­ers and employ­ees from across the com­pa­ny will be respond­ing to cus­tomer ques­tions.”

Fur­ther, Mor­ri­son notes that the brand mon­i­tors social chan­nels through­out tax sea­son to “delight peo­ple talk­ing about our brand with a lit­tle sur­prise.”

“You know, it’s fun­ny because it’s one of those things – you know it’s com­ing and you have to do it and every­body dreads it,” said Jason Chan, group direc­tor of mobile and social plat­form at RGA. “Tur­b­o­Tax rec­og­nizes that real­ly well…what they’ve done well is to take a friend­ly and infor­ma­tive approach to essen­tial­ly answer­ing ques­tions you might have as well as assuag­ing fears.”

The brand also includes pos­i­tive mes­sag­ing that it deliv­ers to con­sumers when they have fin­ished their tax­es, which turns it into a more fun expe­ri­ence. And while Chan said he’s not sure how many con­sumers actu­al­ly share TurboTax’s pro­posed social mes­sages to cel­e­brate that they have filed their tax­es, he notes the brand makes it super-easy to do.

Tur­b­o­Tax also does a good job of keep­ing things sim­ple with an easy-to-use yes-and-no ques­tion for­mat that “takes the com­plex top­ic of doing tax­es and makes it a series of ques­tions any­body can answer,” Chan said. “The over­all approach and atti­tude is calm­ing and reas­sur­ing. They under­stand there is a lot of trep­i­da­tion about the tax code that changes…and they’ve done a good job of demys­ti­fy­ing it and mak­ing it super-sim­ple.”

What do you think of the mar­ket­ing efforts from H&R Block and Tur­b­o­Tax?