Marketing Promotion: Are you still doing viral marketing? Give meme marketing a try!

Viral marketing, which is often criticized but also effective, can attract a large number of users to a product in the short term, but it cannot become an evergreen in the marketing field. A popular marketing plan that comes and goes quickly, once the heat fades, is like a past celebrity and seems no longer worth mentioning. So, what kind of marketing method can make you an ever-victorious general on the "battlefield" and always successful in the marketing field? Below, I will explain it to you in detail.

Everyone knows about viral marketing: using information transmission between customers to let customers spontaneously recommend products to other potential customers.

Many products have used viral marketing, for example:

• Advertising picture of Pechoin’s Old Shanghai Modern Girl.
• Liushen floral water flavoured cocktail.
• The pilot short film of Peppa Pig The Movie, "What's Peppa?"

The success of these cases fully demonstrates the powerful force of viral marketing. By using viral marketing, many companies have attracted a large number of fans in a short period of time.

However, this type of popular product often comes and goes quickly. After a period of time, these marketing strategies were quickly forgotten by customers. For example, no one is willing to forward "What's Peppa Pig?" now, otherwise people will easily say that they are a jerk.

Therefore, the biggest disadvantage of viral marketing is exposed: the marketing strategy is short-lived and cannot be used repeatedly.

So, do we have a suitable way to take viral marketing a step further and allow these marketing strategies to spread among the customer base for a longer period of time?

The author here proposes a new marketing method: meme marketing.

1. What is a meme?

Before explaining memetic marketing, we first need to explain this question: What is a meme?

A meme refers to the cultural spread of an idea, behavior, or style from one person to another.

Memes can include: religion, rumors, news, knowledge, concepts, habits, customs and even slogans, proverbs, expressions, words, internet hits, etc.

Simply put, if genes constitute the characteristics of different organisms, memes constitute the characteristics of different cultures.

To give a simple example: when you see Steve Jobs, you think of Apple. Because as the founder of Apple, Jobs can be considered an essential component of Apple. Hence, “Jobs” is the meme for “Apple.”

So, what are the characteristics of memes?

2. Characteristics of memes

1. Can be copied

Memes can be transmitted from one person to another, and this transmission process is the replication of the meme.

For example: Why do we say “parents are the best teachers for their children”?

This is because parents spend a long time with their children and children trust their parents, so they can easily accept the knowledge taught by their parents, the habits developed, or their views on things. Therefore, many children not only look like their parents (genetic similarity) , but also have similar personalities (meme similarity) .

For example: When you hear a funny joke, do you want to share it with your friends? This process of sharing is the replication of memes.

In recent years, emoticons have become a source of happiness for many netizens, also because they have formed a meme. Many people associate "emoticons" with "happiness" and hope to copy their own happiness to others.

1. Consistent with the environment

Most memes can only survive in certain environments.

For example:

• Programmers: PHP is the best language in the world.
• Post-90s: Haha.
• Fan: I protect the ball like Henry.

These memes can only be understood by people who have been exposed to specific environments. It is difficult for someone who has never been exposed to a specific environment to effectively understand these memes (or, it is difficult to understand these jokes).

Therefore, when you copy a meme to people outside a specific environment, just like "recommending Jay Chou to friends who like symphonies", it is difficult to make people outside the environment resonate with it.

1. Possible mutation

Like genes, memes are not always static; sometimes they mutate.

For example, Jesus Chris used to refer to Jesus Christ, but now many foreigners use it as an interjection.

A similar situation exists in China: before 2017, "really delicious" was just an exclamation point to describe the feeling. But now, the real fragrance means "a person is determined not to do or to do something, but the final behavior is completely opposite."

It is not just the evolution of the environment, but also one's own personality and habits that can cause memes to mutate. For example, some parents are religious and force their children to attend church every week. However, the child developed a rebellious mentality, which eventually led him to become a staunch atheist.

1. Somewhat convincing

A good meme must have a certain degree of persuasiveness.

The good here does not mean that the meme is "positive" or "kind", but that the meme can be spread for a relatively long time.

For example, people who insist that "acidic constitution is prone to cause diseases" insert the somewhat convincing conclusion that "eating more vegetables is good for your health" into the "acid-alkaline constitution" and forcibly interpret it as "vegetables are alkaline, so they are good for health." Therefore, this meme has been able to spread to this day.

For example, there are still hundreds of thousands of people who believe in the "flat earth theory". In order to make the flat earth theory more convincing, they described the sun as being only as big as the moon and rotating regularly around the earth, which is why there are day and night.

1. Willing to actively spread the word

It is not enough to be persuasive; the key to forming a meme is to arouse people's willingness to spread it actively.

The spread of memes is mainly based on two points: the importance of the meme content and the benefits gained from the spread of the meme.

For example: many scientific analysis articles are difficult to be forwarded on a large scale. On the contrary, various rumors on the Internet can be easily spread - "The deadly truth about crayfish: the whole world dares not eat it, but the Chinese are still kept in the dark!" "The incidence of eye cancer in young people has increased by 30%! Looking at the phone after turning off the lights will cause blindness!" "A "floating car" incident occurred in Gannan area!"

This is because the content of rumors is often highly relevant to readers or becomes important due to its rare nature, while rumor-debunking information finds it difficult to achieve these two points. Therefore, rumors tend to spread faster and wider than rumor-refuting information.

Having explained memes for so long, how can we use memes for marketing?

3. How to use memes for marketing?

According to the explanation just now, Lu Dougan divides meme marketing into four points:

1. Building the basic framework

If viral marketing is "providing a topical product", then meme marketing is "providing a basic framework for topics to occur within it."

Many people have received similar messages:

• "If you don't forward this message to five groups within three days, you will..."
• "Today is Ma Huateng's birthday. Forward this message to three groups and you can..."
• "If you don't forward this message, your parents will..."

Sometimes, people forward this information in large quantities out of fear or curiosity about the unknown.

And these messages often have a similar frame: "If you don't retweet, bad things will happen to you; if you retweet, good things will happen to you."

Therefore, anyone can use this framework to create any rumors they want. No matter how outrageous the rumors you see are, they are all based on this framework.

For another example: Tik Tok is able to gain a large number of downloads and reposts not because it produces viral videos. It simply provides a framework within which different types of viral videos can thrive. Therefore, in order to get more viral videos, customers have to download Tik Tok.

Memetic marketing does not provide a finished product, but rather provides a basic framework that makes customers willing to participate in its construction.

1. Improve sense of participation

Since customers can participate in the product construction process, it is very important to enhance the sense of participation in memetic marketing.

Examples include various psychological tests that are often circulated in WeChat Moments (and then blocked):

• “Take a test to see who lives in your left and right brain?”
• "Jungian psychology, test your psychological age."
• "Test what kind of hidden talent you have."

If you look closely at these psychological tests, they are actually promoting a certain product.

However, because customers were happily participating in the campaign, they didn’t notice that they were inadvertently promoting the product.

Psychological tests are a form of memetic marketing. They enhance customer participation and allow customers to make their own choices.

This is also the main reason why various marketing methods using psychological tests are enduring, while viral marketing using popular products (such as Starbucks' cat claw cup) can only last for a short time.

But we can find that: although psychological tests can survive longer than popular products, they still do not last long enough.

This is because, in psychological tests, although different people may obtain different results (such as enhanced sense of participation), the same person will always reach the same conclusion no matter how the test is conducted.

So, how can we make memetic stimulation available to customers repeatedly?

1. Enhancing variability

If you want your customers to get continuous meme stimulation, you need to make sure they have different feelings every time they participate.

We can refer to the marathon competitions that have become popular in various cities recently:

According to people's needs for physical health, marathon is actually an excessive exercise. So why do so many people take the trouble to travel to various cities to participate in marathons?

This is because marathon provides a large basic framework, allowing different people to find different meanings in it: staying healthy, getting rid of anxiety, self-realization, etc. Moreover, the participating cities and environments are different each time, which enhances the sense of change each time the players participate.

The marathon race itself is a memetic marketing for any city - simply by copying the marathon race framework of other cities, it can carry out efficient publicity for itself and attract large-scale investment.

Although the variability of marathon competitions is high, it still requires athletes to run long distances.

Therefore, the popularity of marathon races may last for 3 to 5 years, and as the number of marathon races held nationwide increases, the effect of its meme marketing will become weaker and weaker.

Similar to this, there are various variety shows.

Many people think: "The first season of this show is the best" because the first season of the show gives the audience a fresh feeling, and the various aspects of the show afterwards tend to remain largely unchanged.

When the audience becomes aesthetically fatigued with the same theme, it will be difficult to achieve the same effect as the first season even if the participants are replaced.

If we go a step further and make the variability stronger, will it make the marketing time more lasting?

Anyone who knows something about the two-dimensional world should know Hatsune Miku. Hatsune Miku once became popular on the Internet with her "Onion Song".

However, Hatsune Miku is actually a virtual spokesperson for a speech synthesis software, and Hatsune Miku is actually a meme marketing strategy.

In addition to setting some basic settings for Hatsune Miku (height, weight, appearance, vocal range, etc.), the software company opened most of the power to the majority of creators. The majority of creators have also responded enthusiastically to Hatsune Miku in various ways. Whether it is music, games, racing, concerts, or figures, Hatsune Miku's participation does not seem out of place.

The popularity of Hatsune Miku, in turn, led to the sales of the software, which has remained popular for decades. Software companies have used memetic marketing to successfully promote their products simply by providing a "framework" and leveraging the spontaneous creativity of their customers.

1. Produce emotional catharsis

Meme marketing and viral marketing are similar in that they create emotional catharsis in customers.

The difference is that the emotional catharsis of viral marketing can only provide a fixed direction for catharsis.

For example, the Double Ninth Festival advertisement shot by Wufangzhai previously took advantage of everyone’s nostalgic mentality, parodied the retro advertisements of the 1980s, and vented customers’ nostalgic and entertaining emotions.

Memetic marketing allows customers to create the venting direction they need.

There are many hot topics on Weibo, such as: "What would you do if you became rich overnight?". Some people choose to travel; some people choose to accompany their parents; some people choose to fire their boss... Everyone has their own different emotions that need to be vented. If this super topic is combined with various koi lotteries, the customer conversion rate after the lotteries can be effectively improved.

We can use meme marketing to summarize the characteristics of memes:

1. Can be copied: By the time you finish reading this article, you will have formed an understanding of memetic marketing.
2. Consistent with the environment: This article is mainly marketing-oriented and is more likely to be accepted by marketers.
3. Possible variations: You may not agree with the viewpoints contained therein, or you may have a new understanding.
4. Somewhat persuasive: Memetic marketing combines memetics and has a certain scientific basis.
5. Have the willingness to actively spread: If you click the like button in the lower right corner, you are actively spreading meme marketing.

Source: Braised Dried Tofu