Memetics in Marketing
Memes Pose As The Most Effective Tool In Brand Communication
A MEME is a self-explanatory symbol, using words, actions, sounds, pictures, or anything that can communicate an idea. An idea, when adapted by a large number of people together, forms a part of culture. Richard Dawkins (1976), who first coined the term 'MEME', defined it as a basic unit of cultural transmission or imitation. These cultural traits are passed on from one individual to another.
How A Meme Works
The transmission of information by an agent will change both the agent, and the information. The agent changes by learning something new, the information changes by the knowledge the agent already had. Therefore, a meme reaching an agent, will be transmitted in a changed form. Thus, cultural evolution is Lamarckian: characteristics acquired during the lifetime of the meme's carrier can be transmitted to later carriers selectively, depending on their fitness. Natural selection will pick out the memes who survive this transmission process relatively unchanged. Therefore, the fittest memes, such as certain songs, religious beliefs, scientific laws, or brand names, will have a stable, recognizable identity. All such memes together define the culture shared by a community.
Memetics In Marketing Communication
From a memetic perspective, the goal of marketing communication is infection and not influence. Advertising is the battle to win the minds of customers, the weapons being used are designer mind viruses. These viruses code for certain behaviours among consumers, and give immunity from other communication messages. The first rule of these mind viruses - as it is for biological viruses, is that they spread simply because they are good at spreading. The brain is the battleground where these mind viruses compete for the copying machinery that will allow them to replicate. This means that commercial success may have nothing to do with the quality of the product and have everything to do with the structure of the mind virus.
Creating Memes For Communication
Create a simple meme for the company and watch your business grow. It can take forms of pictures (Marlboro cowboy), words (Always Coca-Cola), sounds (reggae style oo-lala-la-ley-o for Kingfisher or classical Titan soundtrack), actions (The roaring lion of MGM), or imagery (Onida devil). Memes call for messages that can deeply impress the target audience. People never get impressed with words or pictures or music or photographs or special effects or celebrity endorsers. They simply get impressed with the idea. This expects the marketer to connect intimately to the consumer.
The mass media leads to a distribution of these mind viruses via radio, television, the press, Internet, and e-mail. Our minds are suffering from information overload, and our brains are overpowered with mind viruses.
The Success Factor
If anything that is going to be heard and talked about by people (which is any marketer or advertiser's dream-comes-true), it's the unexpected. It is most important to surprise people, to tell them what they haven't heard so far. To be successful, a meme should be more interesting and more able to replicate itself than the other competing memes.
Winning Over Competition
Thus, Memetic analysis using the meme maps allows marketers to analyze how brands are positioned in the minds of the consumers. So, these maps can be adjusted by manipulating the associative memes so that there is a better fit between brand messages and consumers minds. Focus has recently turned to designing and engineering highly infectious memes that could be used in marketing campaigns to alter or influence customer behaviour. This is more important in the context of today's over-communicated and product-saturated competitive world where effective positioning (of course a task of communication messages) holds the key to marketing success.
Reference
Dawkins, R. (1989), The Selfish Gene, (2nd edition), OUP, UK.
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