Tinnitus expert Jennifer Battaglino mentioned that she would like some suggestions on how to apply memes in her marketing so I thought I would add to yesterday’s post on what makes for a good meme by talking about the ways in which you might use them. Incidentally, questions like Jennifer’s are enormously helpful to me when I’m thinking what to write, so thank you for all your questions and comments (this is very much an interactive process – I hope it feels like it!) The key is to think about any aspect of your business in terms of how readily it will be assimilated by your customers and potential customers and passed on. At the more obvious end are things like your brand name and website address; how easy are these to recall accurately first time? Next come the slightly more subtle elements; is your logo distinctively expressed? Does it have a […]
Memes and Marketing: Part II
When it comes to marketing it’s important that your product, brand name, company name and proposition work as memes. That means making as many aspects of your offer as memorable and as easy to pass on as possible. And as we saw yesterday, whilst having both is nice, memorable often beats meaningful. Our heads are full of junk that we’ve heard from brands (and elsewhere) that have become etched into our unconscious, and we all know we’ve heard jokes, quotes or ideas that, at the time, seemed to us utterly brilliant, and yet a couple of hours later they’ve gone. So what is it that makes a meme work well? I’ll give you my personal opinion of what can help: Rhythm and rhymes create narrower options of associations thereby making it more likely that the whole phrase will be recalled accurately (if you can remember the first line, the rhythm […]
Memes and Marketing
Memes are a fascinating concept and vitally important to anyone with an interest in marketing. Defined as “… that which is imitated, after GENE n.) “An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation.” Crucially for someone with something to market, what meme theory says is that one aspect that contributes to effective marketing is how easily whatever it is you’re doing can be copied. “Beanz Meanz Heinz” means roughly nothing. But it’s very memorable and very easy to copy, so it gets propagated by people. It enters your mind, gets remembered instantly and accurately, and stays way beyond the point where it serves any useful purpose to you (if it ever did). When it comes to buying beans the simple fact that the brand Heinz is familiar to your unconscious may well be sufficient for it to seem better (for […]
What Makes a Consumer Choose?
Persuasion master Duane Cunningham was interested to know what causes a customer to choose a product (and dating expert April Brasswell was curious curious too). I suppose, when it comes down to it, this is the most important question for a consumer behaviouralist like me to answer. The difficulty is that it’s a much easier question to ask than to answer – not that that makes it a bad question, I hasten to add. As it happens I’ve been steadily cataloguing (if that’s the right word – which it probably isn’t) the reasons that customers buy something. You may not be surprised to learn that there are quite a lot of factors that can be involved: thus far I’ve detailed 41. When it comes to any single consumer purchase there may be any number of these involved and the purchase is triggered (I suspect) when enough of them exist with sufficient strength to generate the […]
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