Brand Memes

@jamesjefferson @equatoragency #smwgla

Social media has kidnapped your brand.


Who on earth are Equator?

THE big numbers agency.


Tipping point.

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I believe brands are at a real turning point brought about by the prevalence and power of social media. The digital world is to blame I believe the digital world has the answer...


Brand Consumer

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For the last 25 years at least, brands with the staying power and budget would survive through interrupting customers lives Global commerce has brought with it a super-abundance of competition and media choice


Brand Consumer

TV-Industrial Complex Super-abundance of choice &

Niche Consumers &

Digital Natives &

Social networking

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For the last 25 years at least, brands with the staying power and budget would survive through interrupting customers lives Global commerce has brought with it a super-abundance of competition and media choice This has lead to increasingly niched, fragmented markets. The result is that the consumer now dominates the conversation. Not the brand. And if you don’t believe me...


“Sociology, technology and psychology have put advertising in its box.

If you are in advertising you’re about to be buried”

~ Maurice Saatchi

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You might believe this man... He blames the explosion of media choice and the way digital natives (under 25s relate to it) According to neuroscience the digital natives brain is physically different It responds faster, it sifts out, it recalls less So the modern teenager is gaming, socialising and listening to music as well as watching TV Day after recall used to be 35% in the 60s, its less than 10% today. So what are we going to do about it. Well Maurice has an idea, which I’ll come to later. And I have an idea, which I’ll come to now...


Once upon a time...

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So today I want to share an idea about where branding is going as a result of the impact of digital, especially social, media To explain it, I’m going to go back in time a little...


The Big Idea.

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This is David Ogilvy. A genius of advertising. I’ve read and loved all his books and most of his ideas. Unfortunately some are now becoming redundant. He was one of, if not the first to talk about the Big Idea, that would create something big about the brand that would appeal to a mass audience. It was a concept focussed in simplicity, impact and consistency of execution. It had a radical impact on advertising in the 60s, 70s and beyond. Until fairly recently, this thinking was developed, in the light of digital channels, Most succinctly by M&C Saatchi...


One word

equity.

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Maurice Saatchi wrote that piece in the Financial Times I referred to earlier He suggested that advertising seemed dead. But that there was a saving grace. To distil Ogilvy’s Big Idea down to One Word. Brutal simplicity of thought. I like this idea as it forces business to really think carefully about what they stand for and make it really simple. In fact by original thinking ended with this as the conclusion. But of course this is not the solution to a hyper-connected world and an audience that demands discussion not dictates. So what next...


Remarkable.

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I then heard Seth Godin, brilliant if slightly odd looking, but what would I know. His TED talk on standing out focussed on the idea that brands had to be remarkable. It wasn’t about a big idea, or the number of words. Its a concept about whether you’ve made something that people want to share. So now we’re getting somewhere. His metaphor was the purple cow. But there’s a problem. The concept of participation is right. But its still focussing on a single idea. Simply put, a purple cow isnt remarkable for long – fades into brownness very quickly.


“We’ve been asking the

wrong question.”

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This man’s right. Malcolm Gladwell, in another TED talk told the story about Howard Moskowitz. I’ll try and remember how it goes – you should check it out though. Howard has a consultancy and back in 70s Pepsi approached him The said, we’ve got this new stuff aspartame and want to know how much to put in. We know its somewhere between 8 and 12%. Can you figure out what it should be. So what he did was pretty obvious. He took samples at various concentrations and tried them out with thousands of people Plotted the results. But the results didn’t show a neat bell curve. They were all over the place. Most people would make an educated guess, assuming error etc. But Howard wasn’t satisfied with this. And it plagued him for some time after, until it hit him. They had been asking the wrong question: They were looking for the perfect Pepsi They should have been looking for the perfect Pepsis. I think this may be the same for our brand approach.


Normal distribution for a Mass market

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So when you look at the mass market You get this answer


Multiple interest points for a niched market.

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And when you look at niches and when customers You get a different result altogether. We should be looking for the perfect brand We should be looking for the perfect brands. But there’s still a problem. There is still the problem of the browning of the purple cow. How do we maintain relevance over a long period. I think there’s an online phenomenon that has the answer...


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So you may have seen garish things like this around the place. Memes have a very important place in digital culture. They are viral but they are just an idea. A brand as a meme moves away from talkin at your audience Toward performing an activity with your audience. This takes us from the media of interruption, to the media of participation.


A brief history of memetics

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Richard Dawkins first used the term Meme in The Selfish Gene in 1976. His concept is that the life of ideas follows principles similar to Darwinian evolution. So a Meme is essentially a ‘unit of culture’ which at any given time is hosted in people’s minds. It replicates itself from mind to mind. And evolves as it moves. Brands are one of these constructs that live in the minds of individuals. Looking at it in this way, they are therefore social entities, not objects as we’ve thought about them in the past. So the next chapter in Memes 101 is how they work...


Assimilation

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This means it must be respectively noticed, understood andaccepted by the host For example, although you are likely to understand the proposition that your car was built by little green men from Mars, you are unlikely to accept that proposition without very strong evidence. Therefore, you will in general not memorize it, and the meme will not manage to infect you. Successful assimilation is based on these things...


Assimilation

Distinctiveness

Novelty

Simplicity

Coherence

Authority

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Distinctiveness – this is about stand out. Coherence – This is about how well the new idea connects with things you already know Novelty Authority – is it from a trusted source Simplicity


Retention

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The longer the meme stays, the more opportunities it will have to spread further by infecting other hosts.


Coherence

Usefulness

Invariance

Controllability

Retention

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Invariance – how static the meme is, controllability – how much control the host has over it coherence, Usefulness


Expression

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This is how the host of an idea can express and share it with others


Expressivity Proselytism

Expression

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expressivity – How easy it is proselytism – The level the meme urges the host to spread it. Like religeon.


Transmission

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This represents how easily transmitted the meme is. Does the medium make it easy for ideas to be shared. Is there a lot of noise that confuses its transmission. This is where the meme really lives or dies. Online mechanisms contribute to removing transmission inertia.


Transmission

Proselytism Publicity

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publicity – the effort put in to promote the idea proselytism – The level the meme urges the host to spread it.


You may have heard of some of these...

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Internet memes already have enormous reach. Even the most web illiterate will have been touched by some of them. Here are a few of the biggies...


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On April 12th, 1979, ARPANET user Kevin MacKenzie suggested to the MsgGroup mailing list that participants use a “-)” to suggest that a sentence was tongue-in-cheek. And the smilie was born...


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Rick-rolling The “Rickroll” phenomenon began in May 2007[2], someone posted a link to Rick Astley’s music video disguised as a sneak preview for the then newly released videogame Grand Theft Auto IV. Due to the the trailer’s high demand at that time, GTA fans fell victim to the bait-and-switch prank and the joke became quite popular. In fact very popular... 8th inning sing-along at Shea Stadium for the New York Mets season. ��Similarly in November 2008, Rick Astley was nominated for Best Act Ever at the MTV Europe Music Awards after the online nomination form was flooded with votes. over 40 million happy youtube viewers!


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This one’s so well know that it has entered our, or most of our, language. Epically...


Lolcats

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The word "Lolcat" is appeared in 2005, and the domain name "LOLcats.com" was registered on June 14, 2006. The term lolcat even gained global media attention in the United States when it was covered by Time magazine


He started it.

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This chap is called Moot, or Christopher Poole to his friends He created a site called 4chan in 2003 He was 15. He’s 24 now. 4chan is one of the webs most used image boards There are 700m impressions each month and 1m posts per day – all are anonymous. In April 2009, he was voted the world's most influential person of 2008 by an open Internet poll conducted by Time magazine The reason is... its a powerhouse of idea creation and growth. its the birthplace of most of the webs memes – Apart from emoticons all the others I’ve mentioned and more started there. It achieves this because... It is completely anonymous and completely unmoderated – be careful if you want to take a look. So there’s as little inertia to posting as possible. Because its an image board, Users tend to communicate visually. So why do some ideas succeed and others don’t?


“Crowd Resonance.”

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Memes are all about crowd resonance. You can create an idea But you don’t know how well it will resonate until you expose it to its environment The only way to know what will resonate is trial and error. Or more correctly...


Natural Selection.

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This is the power of the meme. So it’s not an end in itself like a big idea, or a one-word equity, or something remarkable It’s a process. Darwin had a phrase for that too: ‘Survival of the fittest’


I want some of that?

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This is ‘The most interesting man in world’ a recent campaign for Dos Equis beer. The idea has been picked up and formed a meme that lives on beyond the campaign So how do you take this away and start doing it? I think it’s pretty straightforward Firstly...


Forget brand. Think brands.

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Firstly forget about your brand expression as a singular ideal Your brand means different things to different people So you need to create different expressions to see what resonates You can’t create one brand expression, you have to create many.


Forget brand. Think conversation.

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The moment you interrupt, and dictate you lose your customers. Your customers are now hyper-connected and expect, even want, to be involved in your brand expression Involve them: Create a panel Open the design process to them Give them half-baked ideas to see what they respond to Just ask! Not only will they warm to you, They will be much more likely to share your ideas with their friends


Inspire creativity.

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Give your customers something they can participate in And give them the freedom to express themselves Even if its a bit wrong...


Inspire creativity.

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The first brand meme I saw was the pick-up and spoofing of the MasterCard advert...


Inspire creativity.

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These images exploded all over the internet Most would never have been sanctioned by an agency controlled model But as a result the language of the campaign has entered general usage.


Unique language.

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You need to know if your meme survives or not. You also need to make it uniquely memorable. One of the characteristics of most successful memes is they use novel language...


Unique language.

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This has the affect of helping them be memorable But it also means its easier to track uptake. Coke recently presented it’s one-word equity ethos and defined that word as “refreshing” Whether or not you agree with the choice of word, it will fail by the meme measure as it will take a lot of money to convince people that refreshing is coke And crucially, if the audience does pick it up and start talking about ‘refreshing’ there’s you can’t necessarily clearly claim it. Whereas if they chose to pour their money into ‘cokalicious’, you would certainly notice if it achieved pick-up.


Start tomorrow...

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So how do you take this away and start doing it. It’s surprisingly easy. Firstly...


What do you believe in?

(Tip: It’s not allowed to be profit.)

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This is actually the most difficult bit. This is the bit where you buy an inter-railing ticket to india to find yourself. You need to see culture and brand as two sides of the same coin. If you’re lucky enough to have a business that is founded on a belief or customer story, you’re golden May favourite examples: Get Satisfaction, Innocent, Virgin If not, you’re going to have to dig deep. Why was the business founded in the first place? What do people love about it?




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This is actually the most difficult bit. This is the bit where you buy an inter-railing ticket to india to find yourself. If you’re lucky enough to have a business that is founded on a belief or customer story, you’re golden May favourite examples: Get Satisfaction, Innocent, Virgin If not, you’re going to have to dig deep. Why was the business founded in the first place? What do people love about it?




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Who else believes in it?














Hey presto! You’ve found your Marketing team.

(Tip: You now need to convince them they want to help you.)


Hey presto! You’ve found your Marketing team.

(Another Tip: Don’t sack your agency, just yet.)


Now you need to feed them ideas.

(Tip: This is discussion not a dictatorship.)


Now you need to feed them ideas.

(Tip: This is where a digital agency that thinks fast comes in... Hello;-)


Track everything. All the time.

(Tip: Do more of what’s trending up, less of what it isn’t.)


You’ll have yourself a Brand Meme in no time.

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By doing all of these things you can create the foundation of a collaborative brand expression Brand expressions that stand for something. Believable Authentic Brand expressions that live and breathe with audiences. I think this concept of Brand Memes brings brands back to life And forms a powerful starting point for wider brand-building conversations – both online and offline.


You’ve been listening to:

Social media has kidnapped your brand.

I’d love to hear what you think about all this:


[email protected]

Business

Brand Memes