11 Aug 09 Marketing and memes

The study of memetics is getting a little more mainstream attention these days, yet still seems to be largely ignored by the marketing community, for whom it is directly applicable.There are a few great talks that outline the idea of memetics at TED, below is one of them.

Basically, we all know how genes, information represented in the structure of DNA, survive by becoming more and more adept at making sure they replicate. Meme’s are the equivalent cultural packets of information.

This information isn’t represented physically in structure like in DNA, but can be represented by strings of “1’s” and “0’s” which take on a myriad of physical forms as magnetic bits on a disk, connections of neurons or the state of a semi-conductor.These memes, in the desire to replicate, are under the same evolutionary constraints as genes. The only difference here is that marketers/ communicators are the architects of memes, and people are the carriers. By studying the architecture of successful memes and their replication strategies, marketers are able to have more success in communicating a message, and growing a brand.

There are many places to begin to be able to study how memes travel and how they replicate. Anything from religion to YouTube will do. This allows us to begin to be able to understand the common features of particularly virulent strains of memes. We can observe how “retweets” travel through networks on Twitter, or how attribution affects marketing campaigns via analytics and then we begin to be able to see patterns of how memes flow throughout society – which then allows us to theorise why.The memetic perspective isn’t good just for marketers, but can be great for understanding and managing your own memetic environment. I even think it could have profound effects for how we manage social issues like rehabilitation. Is it any wonder that when we put criminals in a poor memetic environment like a jail for a sustained period of time that we don’t end up with model citizens afterwards? Perhaps introducing other memes via the Internet would have some cultural impact within rehabilitation centres?There is a large amount of cultural good that could come from improving the memetic landscape in rehabilitation centres. But I digress; in a marketing sense, whenever you are buying display ads, tweeting, or running a search campaign, you have the opportunity to deliver a memetic payload.What cultural significance are you going to have to have your memes adopted?