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.
Irritation and permission as marketing tools
Although he almost never uses the word himself, the subject of using memes in advertising has been nicely covered by viral marketing guru Seth Godin in Permission Marketing (1999) and Unleashing the Ideavirus (2002).
The thrust of Permission Marketing is that a business can no longer survive by interrupting strangers with a message they didn’t want to hear, about a product they’ve never heard of, and using methods that annoy them. Godin’s point is that because of the clutter of messages they are exposed to, they will only notice your message if you really annoy them, which has some obvious drawbacks. In a marketplace in which consumers have more power, Godin maintains that marketers must show more respect if they want to earn the customers’ trust; this means no spam, no deceit and promises kept.
You will notice the parallels here to the material in our series of articles on filters. As the modern world has increased the number of memes we are exposed to, the proportion that make in into our brains continues to fall. If you can build a connection of trust with your audience, you have a far higher change of getting your message across.
It would therefore make sense to use cleverly-designed and distinctive containers and a payload that is simple, consistent with what your potential customers believe, and adds value to their lives. However, much of the marketing industry believes the only way to succeed is to use an intrusive and dissonant container so that it gets noticed, and then hope that the payload gets retained before saturation or allergic reactions set in.
I will leave it to you to work out which of those methods will be more effective.
Viral adverts, and why they don’t really matter
The dream of all advertisers is to create a viral advert, one that gets talked about and spontaneously repeated on the Internet, and which reaches – and therefore carries or reinforces its payload memes – to a much wider audience than originally saw it.
This is possible, but it rarely happens. A good example is that of a British Internet shopping engine called ‘comparethemarket.com’, which launched an advertising campaign in early 2009 featuring an irritated toy meerkcat complaining that ‘his’ site (‘comparethemeerkat.com’) was being swamped with hits for the shopping engine.
We’ve seen the value of personification in brand building earlier in this chapter, and so it came as no great surprise that this was a success, especially as the containers were very cleverly constructed and rather funny. The adverts spread memetically in that that they were talked about, posted on the internet, and even parodied by their competitors.
More adverts followed introducing members of the meerkat family, along with ‘bloopers’ reels, and a ‘biography’ of the main character. This campaign has proved highly successful for the shopping engine and the meerkats are still on British TV. They are extending the brand by giving fluffy meerkat toys as a ‘reward’ to purchasers through the shopping engine.
If a person who is seen an advert is going to talk about it to his friends, or post it on Facebook or Youtube, then he has to expect that there is likely to be some sort of reward in it for him. That reward may be that he is seen as ‘cool’ or knowledgeable, or funny, or worth listening to. Of course, all of those are judgements in the eye of the receiver, which means that they are dependent on the segment of adoption curve you are in, and will be very different for early adopters than they will for the mainstream market. Which, of course, brings us back to the need to tailor your advert to the market rather than just pursue young social connectors.
We’ve already identified that adverts don’t ‘go viral’ because the success factor is low – that can be because they don’t get noticed, they aren’t memorable, they aren’t repeating or often they are just plain annoying. But – and this is probably going to astonish you – I don’t think that really matters.
It doesn’t matter if the advert – the container memes – go viral, as long as the product memes – the payload – gets implanted in the viewer’s brain and spreads from there.
Getting your payload noticed
If you want to build a better advert, then the message about your product must get implanted in the brains of your targets. The factors that make a particular meme successful are listed The lifecycle of a meme, so here I want to talk about memetic aspects of campaign design rather than advert design.
There is no answer that will suit every problem, but if you can answer the following questions then you already know what the right answer for you is:
- What section of the total audience am I marketing to? What segment of the adoption (bell) curve are they in? What memes are in their heads already? What do they value? How important are novelty and utility? How does this need to change as we move along the bell curve? What will be the accidental effect on the rest of the market?
- What message am I trying to get across? How do I wrap the payload in memes that will carry it through the audience’s immune system? How do I balance coherency of belief with novelty?
- What outcome am I trying to achieve? Am I building loyalty by embedding an immune system, or planting an anti-meme that attacks my competitors , or just going for new sales? [NB, if you are intending to plant an antimeme, read the section on beer wars and think again].
- Have I earned the right to give them this information? If so, how do I link back to the things that earned their trust? If not, will cognitive dissonance work, or will it just alienate the audience?
- What media should I use? How rich a medium do I need to get my message across? Do the memes have to be tailored to meet the inherent limitations of the media?
- Are there ways I can use group structures as a way of carrying the memes? What is the right combination of ethos, logos and pathos?
- How do I build a memeplex that contains self-reinforcement, evangelism and heresy memes that will help spread and sustain the product meme?
- Are my containers really that interesting, amusing and worth watching? Will people still remember them ten years from now?
- Is the design of the container consistent with the product that is in it? Will both of them appeal to your target market?
- Can I build in an easy-to-transmit trigger, such as a jingle or shorthand image (think meerkat) that I can use to trigger associations later on?
- At what point will people stop noticing my adverts? If I don’t know, how can I tell when I have reached it? Is there anything that I can do that reduces the annoyance but continues to get my payload delivered? Will continued repetition cause an allergic reaction and alienate my audience?