Humorous works originally designed to humor viewers have become an integral part of the Internet’s history in the 21st century. A strong meme can nowadays be a single photograph or a text line. It conveys emotions and scenarios related to many people, memes entertaining viewers with catchy, easy, and ingenious material.
The target group for memes is the younger generation (15-35 years old). Despite this, memes have stayed on the Internet and typically yield strong responses with persons of all ages and socioeconomic classes, even if a certain segment of the population forgets certain similarities. They will attract all Internet users using a single image or short video showing myriad routines, thoughts, and pop culture references.
Memes And The Corporate World
Due to its public impact, memes have become a part of viral marketing: a marketing form that enters the audience by word-of-mouth and social media with contents shared. Given the benefits of memes to rapidly share knowledge and attract certain age groups, marketers have begun to research their impact to produce material that is sufficiently effective to become viral.
Some enterprises have begun to incorporate memes in their feeds in the social networks, whereas others establish exclusive promotions to redesign a popular meme during this time. In either case, the Internet references act as case studies to test the effects of the digital marketing strategy like memes.
#PawwriHoRaiHai – The Best Current Example of Such Trending Memes
Recently, an example of such power has been witnessed when a video goes viral breaking the Internet nationally and internationally. ‘Yeh Humari Pawri Ho Rahi Hai’ video took the Internet by storm when an Instagram influencer, Dananeer Mirza from Islamabad, Pakistan, made a video with her friends and posted it on her Instagram which has around 922.3K followers.
The video soon caught fire among the youngsters in Pakistan and started dubbing and posting their versions. Later, celebrities have joined the trend by making and sharing their videos. #Pawrihoraihai became the top Twitter and Instagram trend for three days. After the trend of videos goes viral of Pawrihoraihai versions, memes come next.
The Internet has flooded with millions of memes of such Pawrihoraihai trend. Many well-known celebrities, figures, and influencers took part in creating memes of “Ye hum hen, Ye Hamari car hai, Ye Hamari Khawari Ho Rahi” and such.
The trend didn’t die yet, with many national and international brands adopting their marketing trend. We have gathered some of the best examples of how a trend can be an outstanding opportunity to create an everlasting image of your brand in your target audience’s minds.
Amul, one of the well-known Indian dairy brands, used the trend and created their marketing meme, which catches millions of people’s eyes in just a few hours.
The good point about the viral video is that it can fit on any situation, and so the brands took advantage of it. Zomato created their own version of the meme, and it was well appreciated.
Similarly, many other brands have their own version, which you can see below:
Memes as Effective Digital Marketing Tools
The most important platforms for companies to launch their meme marketing are Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. These applications have functions that support visual content, which help to distribute memes to millions of users very quickly. According to Pew Research Centre, Americans between the ages of 18-24 favor these three platforms, with 78% of young adults using Snapchat.
A notable example of the power of memes, as analyzed by Entrepreneur, happened to come from the “Bird Box challenge” and other related trends borne of Bird Box, a Netflix movie that quickly after the movie was released triggered a social media trend. This led to millions of streams on the Netflix platform despite the negative critical response initially gained by the movie.
Memes influence the public to stimulate a business and spread the influence of a brand immediately. As with the previous example, a brand’s digital marketing and distribution strategies can coincidentally result in memes that direct people to their websites. However, companies can also use the popularity of a meme to develop a plan. The two brands that meet different audiences with equal distinction are Denny’s and Grammarly, making the best of memes famous.
A Brief History of Memes
In a term initially coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976, memes are defined as information transmitted and replicated through communication networks in an evaluative process akin to biological genes.
While the research of memes has been in progress for almost two decades, the convergence of technological and cultural conditions during the late ’90s opened the way for memes to become what they are now with reinterpretations of melodies, quotations, film scenes, etc.
Some of the first memes that went viral and became Internet phenomena between 1998 and 2000. These were:
- The translation error during the opening sequence of the Japanese arcade game Zero Wing
- The Dancing Kid from the brief video of a 3D baby dancing to the song “Hooked on a Feeling”)
- A quotation from a scene in the movie Lord of the Rings
The recent trend of memes began to evolve faster, taking various appearances and emerging on numerous internet spaces after the first humorous images circulated over the Internet. Thus, memes have started to be put in subcategories according to their formats and goals, with several cases act as more than brief entertainment.
Currently, memes are used frequently for multiple web initiatives of varying performance levels. In certain ways, their popularity reaches beyond the Internet. We see magazine interviews, TV sketches, and so on. As such, it is no wonder that they’ve found a place in digital marketing, mainly when we take note of the effect that viral photos/videos may have on a brand’s popularity.
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