Competition for the minds of potential customers is fierce, and the brand manager will need to use all of the memetic tricks described on this site to ensure that his memes attract new customers and stop existing ones from defecting.
If a brand is a memeplex, then it should be subject to the rigours of evolution. We would expect to see copy fidelity (exhibited as brand stability and longevity), a degree of mutation, and the effects of selection pressures.
Let’s start with some great examples of copy fidelity:
- The Minnesota Valley Canning Company’s ‘Jolly Green Giant’ (born 1928);
- The Michelin Man, dating back to 1898;
- Various battery-powered bunnies, more of which later;
- The U.S. Forestry Service’s Smokey Bear, created in 1944 and still fighting fire;
- Barbara Millicent Roberts, better known as Mattel’s Barbie, who was 55 years old in 2014 (even if she doesn’t look a day over 15);
- Tony the Tiger, who promotes Kellogg’s Frosties breakfast cereal (a relative youngster, born 1952); and
- Ronald McDonald, whose face (according to Advertising Age) is recognized by nearly 96% of American children.
Interestingly, all of these are examples of personification - linking a brand with a fictional character whose virtues promote the product. In the case of the ‘Jolly Green Giant’, the company was renamed in favour of the image. Barbie is also particularly interesting case, in that she is the subject of a biography and several novels that add to the richness and complexity of the meme. Barbie has been an astronaut, a doctor and a racing driver, taking her beyond more traditional role models such as dancer and beach bunny.
We can also identify the use of strong and persistent memes used to promote products that are not so strongly personified. Consider Nike’s ‘Just Do It‘ which features feats of athleticism that the company’s products would presumably help you to achieve, and a whole range of long-lived slogans for sarsaparilla-based drinks, including the wonderful ‘Things go better with Coke’ (NB This refers to a well-known brand of soft drink and not to any other form of stimulant).
Directed evolution of brands
If brands are memes, we would expect them to mutate, and we certainly see that. Take Philip Morris, who originally introduced the Marlboro brand as a woman’s cigarette in 1924. In the early 1950s, the company tried to increase the sales among men, and its iconic image of rugged, independent cowboys worked superbly, increasing the sales thirty-fold in three years.
Or R.J. Reynolds, who found in the late 1980s that the Camel brand had a reputation as an ‘old-man’s cigarette.’ The company wanted a new campaign to make the brand more attractive to young smokers, and came up with Joe Camel, launching the new brand image in 1987. In 1991, the Journal of the American Medical Association (see Fischer (1991)) published a study showing children 5 and 6 years recognised Joe Camel as readily as they recognised Mickey Mouse or Fred Flintstone. Despite public pressure, the company continued using the image until 1997.
Brand managers have a particular issue in that the selection criteria of their audience is constantly changing. Think of a particular brand of clothing aimed at young men: this demographic will be strongly influenced by sound clips from the coolest young bands, so these would be good thing to link to the brand by endorsements (ethos) or by frequent repetition. Similarly, sporting stars are often used to advertise men’s grooming products. But music is constantly changing and sports stars have a limited life, so the brand manager has the choice of seeking new customers (and implicitly jettisoning the old ones) by constantly refreshing the brand identity or letting it age with the loyal customer base.
This brand refreshment is another example of directed evolution of a memeplex. Consider Volvo’s branding: Volvo’s vehicles are traditionally regarded as very safe, but safe is not particularly sexy. The only groups that tend to pick ‘safe’ cars over ‘sporty’ cars are women and men over fifty - these are not core car-buying groups, and you could argue that Volvo’s sales growth was driven only by the mother’s veto.
Heubusch (1998) reports that Volvo cars had always been associated with ‘safety’ in the USA but Volvo’s market share slipped as government actions raised car safety standards in other manufacturers as well - when they were no longer the only ‘safe’ car, other perceptions of the cars (‘boxy’, ‘slow’, ‘ugly’ etc) predominated. So in the 1980s, Volvo switched their adverts from images of crash tests to images of people walking on the beach and playing ball. Their names and the dates of serious automobile accidents scrolled across the screen. The people were survivors who ‘share the belief that a car saved their lives.’ Volvo had switched from using fear to market their products to attempting to invoke trust. Once this meme had reached saturation in the buying public’s minds, they switched again to emphasise the ‘sportiness’ of their newer models.
Accidental evolution of brands
Evolution of brands can also occur without conscious action on the part of their owner, and sometimes very much against their interests. In Europe and Australia, tribes of pink fluffy rabbits known as the ‘Duracell Bunnies’ appear in TV adverts climbing mountains, playing soccer and doing all sorts of macho things. These bunnies do a good job of spreading the idea that Duracell batteries last longer. In America, however, the association between pink fluffy rabbits and batteries is owned by the Energizer Corporation after Duracell forgot to renew their patent.
So in America, the phrase ‘Energizer Bunny’ is a symbol of, to quote the company, ‘longevity, perseverance and determination’. When that phrase entered popular speech and then into American TV and the movies, it was exported across the English-speaking world. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you asked a Brit or an Australian what product a pink fluffy rabbit advertised that they would give an answer that Duracell wouldn’t like.
We saw another example of meme ‘borrowing’ in Memetics 101 where the Macarena was spread through its adoption by a political party, and similarly, Wendy’s ‘Where’s the Beef?’ hamburger campaign was hijacked as a political slogan in the 1984 U.S. presidential election. But unlike the Duracell Bunny, in both these cases the hijack benefited the original meme creator.
Brand memes will face selection pressures and evolve, just like any other memes. So if you want to minimise the mutation of your brand, you can do it by building in a strong immune system in the form of a holy book or a set of values that actively resists change.
Coca-Cola managed to capture a whole generation of loyalists through astute co-branding with the war effort in the early 1940s, and became part of ‘the American way of life’ (see Allen (1994)), which lent persistence to the brand. An immune system can be a mixed blessing, of course, and I’ve often wondered if Coca-Cola’s failure to introduce a new formula for its flagship brand in 1985 (see Hays (1994)) was less to do with its sweeter taste than with a perceived assault on traditional American values.
Not the message you wanted?
We established in the articles on filters that people attribute value to memes more readily by associating them with what they already believe. It should therefore come as no surprise that your customers will interpret your brand using their already-installed filters. The brand awareness you get may not the brand awareness you intended, and you may come across unexpected selection pressures.
Take the Marlboro Man on his horse, smoking a cancer stick and wearing cowboy gear: this was intended to be an image of rugged individualism, the hard, self-reliant character that every American man deep-down believes he is. However, Walle (1997) reports that in West Africa, the image of a man driving a herd of fat cows is associated with a high-status individual, part of the mainstream establishment. This may be a valuable association in that market, but it will change the nature of the payload that Philip Morris can associate with their brand