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Six Memetic Strategies To Make Your Product More Memorable

Every entrepreneur would love to see people standing in lines to buy his or her product. The first and obvious step towards this is, of course, offering a product or service people would love. Bear in mind that I did not write a high-quality product. Quality is a subjective term, it means different things to different people. A product people love simply keeps the promise of fulfilling one’s needs. The ice cream sold by a walking salesman at the beach doesn’t have to be top-notch — as long as they chill, people will stand in lines to buy them. There is one more thing company owners often forget. They think that having a great product and telling about it is enough. Yet there is something much stronger than advertising a product: it’s a product that advertises itself. The one that infects others with its mere existence. How do you make a product more memorable?

The first iPod ads featured a black silhouette on a colorful background, and… white earphones.

I want that too!

The ice cream on the beach is a great example. You can, of course, see the seller from very far, you can hear him screaming “Cold ice cream!” but there is a greater chance that before he reaches you, you’ll see people eating ice cream. And when you do, you’ll want ice cream for yourself, too, right? When you walk through a park full of people, you might get infected by plenty of product-related ideas: frisbee, running, a new model of a bike… Such need creation is far more effective than traditional advertising. Especially in groups characterized by strong peer influence, such as teenagers. Producers have long been aware of that fact and have been modifying their products slightly so that everybody knows when someone is using their product. When Apple produced first iPods, they faced a problem: when you’re using your iPod, it stays in your pocket. But all it took was adding characteristic white ear-buds and you have yourself a viral idea. Nikon One or Beats use a similar strategy.

Ideas like viruses

Fashion or trend is an idea that spreads. It’s a dream of nearly all producers: to create a fashionable product increases the number of customers exponentially. But how do you go about it? Can you program fashionable? The science behind infectious ideas is called memetics.

The term meme describing an idea that replicates itself by infecting others was coined by Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University. In 1976 his book, The Selfish Gene popularized memetics. Just like genes store the information on our appearance, eye color, height and so on, the memes store cultural information: behaviors, fashion, clothes… And just like we are trying to modify genes in order to achieve certain goals, we can also try to modify memes to influence behaviors. The latter is especially interesting for marketers.

Memetics claims that different memes compete for the finite amount of our attention, there are only so many ideas we can consume. The fashion is created from the strongest memes, the ones that won the race for attention. This means there’s no definite way of creating a successful meme, as its success depends not only on its strength but is also dependent on the strength of competition. Though we can take some measures to ensure our meme is stronger. What can we do?

Show, teach, connect

In his book Virus of the Mind the author, Richard Brodie, defines three kinds of memes. If you’re doing any kind of marketing, you should familiarize yourself with them.

Memetic products and services

If you start looking at your products using memetic point of view you’ll soon realize you can make them better by trying to win the attention race. Advertising and marketing strategists are aware of this fact. So next time you plan a product or service, consider using one of those winning strategies:

One of the first Coca-Cola ads targetting African American consumers, directed by Moss Kendrix, the first African American marketing specialist hired by Coca-Cola in 1948.

Memetics will not replace traditional marketing or brand building strategy, but adding this knowledge to your arsenal will let you take over the competition. Because the brand happens in the headWell? Will you share this post now? Even your grandparents knew that Facebook and Twitter have always been the best way of spreading knowledge.

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