Memes. The most powerful marketing tool that no one in marketing understands.
Hello. My name is Nathan and I am a Graphic Designer, Web Developer, & Social Media Manager for Pacific Sky Creative.
I am an avid Redditor with over 100,000 fake internet points(Karma) on one Reddit account alone. If you were to head on over to Reddit.com/r/top, you will most likely find that you are not allowed access. This is because r/top is reserved only for the top 1% of Redditors.
I am that 1%: http://bit.ly/2gJ7rsX
This accomplishment however did not simply come from posting memes, but understanding a commonly backburnered character trait, known as Empathy. Which I will talk about in a future article.
Today however, our focus is on Memes, and how to use them PROPERLY to your advantage in marketing.
First, before you can attempt to create a meme for marketing purposes, you must have a good understanding of “meme culture”, and what exactly a “meme” is.
Pronounced “Meem”
A meme is a visual representation of a pop culture situation, event, or person with a commonly relatable, underlying message. Think of them like inside jokes that millions of people are in on. Memes also follow a very specific format, and they have to follow this format otherwise they won’t be impactful(not funny at all). Let me quote my fellow author and colleague, Tyler S., “If genes are the units that characterize a plant or animal, memes are the units that characterize a culture.”
“If genes are the units that characterize a plant or animal, memes are the units that characterize a culture.”
For example, if you were to look at this image:
you would most likely recognize it — it’s been captioned thousands of times by people celebrating successes, this is because this meme is called “Success Kid”. Because of the power of memes, this little kid’s image will forever be associated with success.
Other very common and popular memes have included, Actual Advice Mallard, Philosoraptor, One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor(Boromir), Pepe The Frog, But That’s None Of My Business(Kermit), and just about six thousand more. The possibilities with memes are truly endless.
Meme culture is constantly evolving. All of the above Memes I mentioned are mostly considered outdated, meaning that people have now posted them so many times that even with new captions, they just aren’t that funny anymore. Due to this type of fleeting popularity, the meme culture evolves.
Right now at the end of 2016, the height of memery are what is called “Shutterstock Memes” or simply “Stock Memes”. The format for these consists of a watermarked stock photo with a caption written above the image. The caption doesn’t describe what is actually happening, but a funny or clever interpretation. Here is an example of a stock meme that I posted to Reddit:
That image post received over 2400 upvotes in only a few hours and currently sits as the top 14th(was 9th before the Joe Biden & Evil Kermit bubble) most upvoted meme of all time on /r/memes.
Why? You might be asking yourself, well let’s break it down:
There are of course other factors that contributed to the success of that post; timing for example, as well as good old fashioned luck.
Using a meme properly is very very important. If you use a meme incorrectly it will backfire and portray a negative and out-of-touch(non-dank) feel for your brand or business. www.knowyourmeme.com is the meme standard for getting information on all viral memes. If you are interested in using a meme simply because of the image on it, you are most likely going to use it improperly.
Let’s take a look at some examples of memes used improperly and I will show examples of how they should be used.
1. Unpopular Opinion Puffin
Incorrect Usage:
Correct Usage:
2. One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor(Boromor)
Incorrect Usage:
Correct Usage:
As you can see in the incorrect examples, even though the captions may be relevant to the image itself, they have nothing to do with what that meme implies. The Unpopular opinion puffin meme, is only to be used to convey just that, an unpopular opinion. It’s sort of a cutesy way to be edgy and contrarian.
The Boromir meme comes from the movie, The Lord of the Rings, from a scene in which the character Boromir explains that “One does not simply walk into Mordor”, thus creating the perfect image macro opportunity to describe situations where completing a certain task is not as easy as first thought.
This is where memes become difficult to explain… Partly due to the fact that the word “meme” is used to describe just about every type of internet joke, however the word Meme has much deeper roots than the internet. The word meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, as an attempt to explain the way cultural information spreads; Internet memes are a subset of this general meme concept specific to the culture and environment of the Internet.
Knowing that bit of information you can now hopefully see the difference between something that is actually a formatted Meme, or simply a funny joke or picture.
So how do you apply a marketing strategy to memes?
Now that you understand what memes are, it’s time to apply a product or brand. Meme culture is considered sacred by those who are very active within it, meaning that memes that blatantly attempt to market or sell something are going to be snuffed out and downvoted into oblivion. You almost need to subliminally insert your marketing message into a meme that can be relatable to everyone.
This is why Stock Memes are a meme marketer’s dream. Stock Memes don’t have a predefined format for the images. you can download and use ANY stock photo as long as the caption is funny and relevant to the image. There are millions of stock images allowing you to cater a meme to just about any specific brand, product or demographic.
Below is an example Stock Meme for Geico insurance that I created:
Yes, this one is a little maudlin.. and I doubt Geico would use something like this, however it works for their brand. The subject in the image is the Lizard who is being eaten by the Hawk, we can relate the lizard to the Geico Gecko, and because it appears that the Gecko is smiling(certainly isn’t), we can imply that even though the Gecko is about to die, he will die happy having used Geico’s services. Geico could post a meme like this with a simple watermark for their brand to Social Media and have it go viral. People will like it, upvote it and repost it, not ever realizing that they are marketing for the brand name “Geico”.
Hopefully you can use the information in this article to help you harness the power of Internet memes, and boost your marketing campaign.
Good luck!
