Memed — laughed and felt understood
An ideal relationship status isn’t it?
You laugh with each other, or you at least laugh at what he has to say, and you feel understood fully.
That’s the state we are in with the trend -meme marketing.
A fairly popular trend widely used to induce fun, humour in brand marketing, and individual posting as well.
In the case of individual posts, it brings out the profile of the person and thus attracts the audience to him or her. It’s more like building an audience who “gets you”, could be by exchanging memes with regard to specific topics, ranging from philosophy, photography, fitness, politics, food, technology, and more.
The brands also use the same strategy to build an audience in a fun way. This helps them to convey the features or things on offer in a lighter way. Classic example could be telling the audience of their problem statements by using a meme and thus highly relatable and thus can slowly slip in the solutions as well later. By then, the audience has a bond with you because you related with them on their pain points. Smart isn’t it?
They say the meme builds up by sharing, starts with teenage group sharing, then building to celebrity sharing in 2 days and by 3rd day the brands catchup to it and it can go on for sometime, mostly in the range of a month. There are few memes that have existed for years as well.
So for brand managers it’s a challenge to catch the wave at the right time. A stale meme posting also gives out a me-too-in-game vibe, but otherwise the the first set of audience identify you as a brand or profile that is up-to-date and vibing. So, in a specific field , to look out for the brand status achieved.
This summer, the #brat trend with its lumiscient colour has been trending for quite a while with US presidential candidates as well as using it.
The meme when used is majorly targeting top of the funnel customers who are discovering the brand. The humor of meme attracts the audience to the post, we as human once we see such a content, would want to share with some of the contacts whom you think with relate to the humor part and thus the brand message gets spread as well.
It’s very cost effective as the creative could be a image which is downloadable from Internet and most of the text on it is as per the trend. The most important addition is your brands twist to it, which makes it most special and yours only content. The brands can use a trend only if there is absolute concurrence with it, otherwise it would feel “me-too-just-for-sake” posting.
So the adapted meme should spark a conversation or atleast a smirk. Once that’s done, there is a lot of possibilities for it to be shared and thus adding to the brands virtual currency of brand name recurrence, relatable brand name or much more.
The meme can be classic reaction image ones, a video inspired with the trend included, a witty caption of yours to the meme. As any marketing technique, authenticity is the key factor. Isn’t it fantastic that you are using already existing( so not authentic content) to create the cloud of authenticity. A highly regarded skill at that to come with such a brilliant copy that retains the essence of the meme and brings out the unique brand requirements.
It’s a fact that if you don’t catch up with this meme culture, most of the dialogues on the Internet can be non palatable in no time. So catching up on these trends is fun and challenging some time.
Now, two trends in focus to deepen our understanding.
Both started by ironically 2 different statures of people. One by an office goer, Jools LeBron, she, on a random day, posted a sarcastic video out of her frustration to get ready in a particular way to office.
This conveyed her need to be demure to be confirming to something as well as being mindful. A buzz word at that, caught the Internet by storm this fall of 2024 and whole lot of brands and celebrities posted content saying they are demure and mindful, which included Jennifer Lopez, posting a video of her drinking something very normally, but with this hash tag. Penn Badley was packing up his shoot demurely and mindfully and posted it, so did a lot of brands like even NASA, which had a quirk factor to it all and thus got trending.
Another trend from the earlier part of year during summer when Charlie XXX released the album Brat in June made a wayward concept of feminism famous. It was being bratty, that being non conformist in thinking and also dressing. This also caught on during summer, even presidential election campaigns using it.
Both trends if you see is bringing out a penned up emotion alive … one being free and bratty and other mocking being demure and thus only being mindful. Most of the audience would identify with it especially in both cases young girls or woman, which got this trending.
Charlie got her dues of promotion of her album and her brand, and Jooles also is sorting out how to patent her demure statement and catch the “wave”.
What would be the trend for winter?
Being blitzy! We wait for it to come out and add our twist and enjoy the wave.
