Industry changes with the emergence of memes.

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Trends

Memes have disrupted the marketing industry and engage a new market that does not interact a lot with traditional marketing, such as ads on TV and in magazines. Brands now seek to use memes catch the attention of consumers. Firms have been established to sell ideas to their clients that incorporate memes. According to Forbes, these firms are called “enteractive”, meaning entertainment and interactive, companies. An example of one company is called Viral Spiral, which primarily collaborates with popular YouTubers, Instagrammers, and other online influencers while identifying new video trends and memes to base their advertisement concepts off of.

Besides the trend of using memes for advertising, memes are often used in the workplace today among colleagues. People use gifs and still picture memes in emails and other digital messages when communicating with colleagues. For teams and companies that want to create a friendly workplace culture, memes can be very useful to relax tensions among people and allow for more creativity and collaboration. A blog notes that one should just make sure to keep the meme relevant to the post to prevent a reduction of productivity or causing confusion.

Impact

Some established brands that attempt to market using memes fail, but many brands, especially new brands or startups, in touch with memes succeed in their meme advertisement campaigns. It is also difficult to produce relevant meme advertisements since memes rapidly grow and die from loss of use. Incumbents like Gucci attempted the enteractive marketing approach and failed while a new company called Hipchat apparently succeeded. This marketing scheme has little potential to disrupt traditional marketing tactics because companies seem out a touch. Collaborating and sponsoring online influencers appear to have more sway because people viewing online content are more influenced by endorsements rather than poorly done meme marketing. On the other hand, memes used in the workplace have a higher potential for being disruptive, but it is difficult to separate its effects from the overall effect of using ICT’s at work.

Moving Forward

It is unlikely that memes offer a truly disruptive innovation in marketing. Unless an entirely new strategy of incorporating memes is used by advertising firms, meme marketing will not take off in the foreseeable future. However, memes are changing the workplace culture. Memes are becoming enmeshed in regular everyday communication as we stated in Memey Connections, and they will become a large part of communication in workplaces, especially between colleagues in the same teams.