Enter - Memes And Marketing

Brands use memes to entertain, educate, or promote their products to their target audience. This is meme marketing, a new way of marketing, which in its essence means - connecting better with people.

The impact of memes is because of a simple reason - shareability.

And so, when a brand taps into the power of meme marketing, they unlock another level of marketing - delighting their target audience.

Fun Fact: The word ‘Meme’ (derived from Greek - mimema) was first coined back in 1976 by a biologist named Richard Dawkins in his book, “The Selfish Gene” to describe a gene that meant “to imitate”. Originally, Dawkins used ‘meme’ to describe an idea, behavior, or style that rapidly spreads from person to person in a culture.

And when you think of memes that we share with our friends, the meaning isn’t too far-fetched. This brings me to...

The Virality of A Meme:

Say Coronavirus - one person got the virus in Wuhan, and when that person came into contact with other people, the virus spread, causing it to be viral throughout the world today.

Memes going viral work the same way, only the virality depends on the meme’s relatability to people.

A meme’s relatability is to what a virus’ infection rate is.

The more relatable a meme is that caters to a large audience, the more people like you and us shared with our friends. And there are millions of people out there just like us, sharing the same meme with their friends, making the meme widely popular to go viral!

Let’s take our example - Kraftshala’s Instagram Page

Check this meme out:

Hence, we already have followers who relate to the context (social media managers being asked to design posts as well). If you look at the number of likes, you can see that over one thousand people have related to the post.

Actually, let’s see the post insight.

Meme marketing works for us because our target audience is young, and stays on social media for a longer time (read: all the time). And through our digital marketing courses , we’ve built a community of budding digital marketers who relate to memes that are around their experiences. As they relate to our memes, they share this with more people, thus forming a network of people now relating to that meme.

So now that we’ve mentioned ‘memes’, ‘relatability’, and ‘audience’, you know where we are going with this, don’t you?

Presenting… Some Brands Who Got Meme Marketing Right

Zomato’s Meme Marketing

Even they accept that they’re a meme page. Zomato puts memes at the heart of their marketing strategy! And it makes sense why.

Their target audience is 18-35-year-olds who are active on social media and are on social media for fun. Zomato creates funny posts around trending topics that their users are interested in. They cater to one emotion primarily - fun.

Paper Boat’s Meme Marketing

Their post templates are unique, meme-ic, and exactly nostalgic, for a target audience ranging from 25-35-year-olds. The leader of their niche, they go their own way to create these for people to travel back to childhood.

India’s Elon Musk - Kunal Shah’s Meme Marketing

And if you follow him on Twitter, you’ll come across a meme every Monday of every week.

For example:

And now that we reach the end…