Meme marketing

Abstract

Memes have become daily part of lives and the most acceptable form of content consumed in social media. To define a meme — an image or video with or without text with humorous content that is created to engage the viewers and spread across the internet users. It is more of a culture that has formed around the content with movie/popular politics/sports etc. are being used for context and incorporating a basic human understanding to use that context in various circumstances in a humorous way. Moment Marketing is the hottest trend that brand follow now-a-days and this content will be mostly in the form of memes. Be it IPL or Olympics or Elections or festivals, content is created from it and used for creating a brand related image to increase the brand awareness among the consumers. Meme marketing is being taken seriously by various brands these days and some of the big players using this form of content include Zomato, Netflix, Durex, Amul etc. They engage the users in a way that seems to not just concentrate on sales but a genuine attempt to try and engage everyone by giving away more information for general audience. It is a unique talent by brands that is hard to replicate and incorporate in the employee selection criteria as humour is difficult to measure as the quote goes like — ‘There is no such thing as an appropriate joke, that is why it is a joke’— The Office. In digital era, this form of content in increasingly gaining traction but hard to implement by everyone. It is seen as an alternative to ads, although memes are not advertisements for products/services for a company and never can be used to replaced ads in any medium. Random viral content is used by the brands, and rarely do they come up with own content and this is because viral content is fad which has already reached many and creating a post related to it easier than coming up new content than may or may not go viral. Mobile app notifications have become a great avenue for funny and witty content, especially by food apps which sends reminders at various times of the day. In this study we have tried – I. To study the customer engagement mechanisms and the brand awareness associated with the meme marketing II. Influence of regional content in inducing purchases