Meme marketing today....

Brands and logo are being replaced by memes.

Marketing today is instantaneous [see photo] and yet it has a long tail. It is not about the brand, or the logo, but the images associated with a person, product, or service. If you can make me laugh then you have me. Not just my attention but me as a consumer of your messages. You have implanted a meme inside my head that is so much more than a brand or a logo. You have struck my funny bone and prompted a reaction that leads me to want to share the joke, or just the image, that you sent me. Suddenly your message has gone viral.

There are many great applications for marketing images today, including TikTok, but because these are all "attention seeking" platforms they unlikely to last into the next decade. The videos posted on TikTok will last and so will the person, group, company, etc that produced them even as the platform that launched them fades. Indeed the great thing about meme marketing is that the message can hop from one platform to another with ease. And in the process of hopping around these images can build long-term trust between the sender and the receiver. Perhaps greatest thing about this new marketing schema is that it quickly curates a one-to-many channel for transmitting both digital and analogue messages.

Images have been used before with great success by Apple [Think different!] MasterCard [Priceless] and Benetton [Colours of Benetton] to name a few. However. Those images were never attained the quality levels that are available today; and more importantly, they were aimed at individuals not at consensual groups. It is consensual groups who do the marketing for a TikTok message sender not the application and not the content producers.

Here is the rub.....

Today's marketing experts curate content. Future marketing gurus will create memes.

Richard.

The photo above has no context and no context. It is hollow-shell for marketing purposes and yet it is in and of itself adorable, unexpected, charming and funny. It can quickly form a meme that goes viral with an array of different contexts and content to match perfectly to consumer groups of all types, sizes, and political persuasions.