Memes in Marketing: An Example Of 4 Brands That Did It Right

According to research, the average person spent nearly two hours on social media every day, with a large chunk of this most likely being taken up by memes.

Apart from being entertaining and funny, memes are currently very popular on social media, and play a huge role in internet culture.

With the definition of 'A joke, fad or a memorable piece of content that goes viral across the internet, usually accompanied by a clever text', it's not hard to see why so many brands are recognising this and using memes as a marketing tool.

Barkbox Instagram is potentially the greatest home for memes, due to its highly visual nature. Barkbox, being a subscription service for dog treats and toys, recognises the power of memes, prioritising animal-related memes as their primary content.

They create memes that are both humorous but relatable to dog owners and animal lovers, which ensures the picture to gain a lot of traffic, through shares and people tagging their friends.

Gucci

Luxury Brands don't tend to use humorous content or viral trends in marketing, and focus more on creating premium, high-quality ads to portray their expensive, luxury products and business. Recently, the premium brand Gucci joined the meme marketing, releasing a popular meme advertising one of their new products, the ''Le Marché des Merveilles' timepiece.

As expected, these posts had mixed reactions, some being put off by the companies attempt to join mainstream culture, however the reaction overall was mainly positive, people loving the brands bold approach towards a form of simpler, yet new content.

Denny's

Denny's diner is a restaurant chain that sell a range of pancakes and coffees, who have also jumped onto the meme trend, posting a 'zoom in' meme on twitter, just as the meme was starting to grow. This in turn caused the tweet to go viral, generating 122,103 retweets and 172,537 likes. By taking this opportunity quickly, it has created huge brand awareness for the business and has increased their social media following dramatically.

Hipchat

The company, Hipchat shows exactly how viral memes have become, when they used a viral online image on an offline billboard advertising campaign.

It cleverly used the 'Y U NO Guy' meme on a billboard in San Francisco, cleverly capturing the attention of internet loving customers as they drove by, which is the exact audience an online messaging platform like Hipchat is trying to target.

This advert was argued as a little lazy, due to the business jumping onto a trend and putting no effort or time into using their own ideas. However, the context is what makes it particularly clever, as the combination of an online trend and an offline method of advertising results in a refreshing ad.

What can we learn from memes being used for marketing you ask? Here are some takeaways from this article:

-Memes can be a hit or miss - like most aspects of marketing, everything can have a positive or negative effect, and it's important to see this and consider the negative effects before banking on your content to receive just the positives.

-Using memes can further engagement and your audience - Memes are so popular because they are a highly shareable form of content and can improve the brand image of your company.