A comparision of the impact meme marketing on purchase intention for experiential goods and material goods

Abstract

Social media has become an extremely popular and effective way to communicate the values of the brand. Thus, it has been used extensively by marketers for promotion. One innovation in this field has been meme marketing which is becoming popular day by day. With the decrease in the average attention span of the millennials and Generation Z, meme marketing is proving to be an effective method, being a combination of both entertainment and knowledge. While meme marketing is a great tool, the purchase intention of consumers is affected differently while watching meme ads of experiential goods and material goods. By considering traditional and meme advertisement on both the type of goods, statistical methods have been used in this report to understand the significance of the difference in purchase intention and, thus, buying behavior of a customer while watching these ads. This has been studied through an experiment conducted among students of a specific college, who were in the age group of 18 to 35 old and belonging from Tier |, Il, and III cities. The report suggests that while meme marketing is an exceptional marketing tool, this tool might have a different impact on the purchase intention of consumers in the case of experiential goods and material goods. In the case of experiential goods, meme ads are better not significantly better than traditional ads because of the subjectivity involved in the user experience. However, in the case of material goods, meme ads proved to have a better impact on the purchase intention of consumers than traditional ads. While this does show that meme marketing might be more effective for material goods than for experiential goods, there are several other factors that might have an impact on the meme ads which include meme content, iconicity, knowledge of current trends on the internet, etc. Hence, managers should also reflect on these factors before venturing into meme marketing for their brand.