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 which read a safer, less risky option) than any other available.
Some people go so far as to suggest that our entire mental world is made up of memes.
It is perfectly possible to hold (or host) conflicting memes, and certainly possible to host memes that aren’t particularly constructive or useful; some may even be damaging to us. For example, supposing you believe that the readings from tea leaves can guide your future and they tell you not to seek medical attention for a condition that could be treated effectively by, say, antibiotics. Your stupid tea leaf reading meme would be the prime cause of your death.
Some people dispute the theory of memes, saying that if everything is a meme, and copied for its own sake of being copied, then nothing makes any sense at all.
But this ignores what I consider to be the key issue with memes; that of timescale.
In my view, over an appropriately long timescale, only good memes will survive. Good memes are those that serve a useful function for the people who host them. But just as for genes, that timescale is many thousands of years, rather than the compressed periods people typically consider.
Lots of beliefs were fundamentally accepted in their day and now have no place in our brains. There was a time when it was widely accepted that the sun and planets revolved around the earth. Someone suggested it, it seemed a reasonable explanation for stuff in the sky changing, and even probably made the people who passed it on seem clever. Now we don’t think of that thought, it’s been bumped by a different, more useful meme, that tells us our planet revolves around the sun. Of course, most of the memes that died out are thoughts we have no historical record of and certainly no memory of – which helps us delude ourselves that everything we think is absolutely right.
So why is this so important to marketing? I’ll tell you next time…
Philip Graves
