Meme Marketing Gets Eyeballs

New-age brands are increasingly depending on memes to reach out to Gen Z and millennials at a lower cost.

- Asmita Dey

SAGNIK DUTTA, a 23-year-old techie from Burdwan, a small town in West Bengal, spends hours scrolling meme pages on Facebook and Instagram. I like how memes capture topical issues in a humorous way. For instance, every time an iPhone is launched, social media gets flooded with memes around pricing,” she says.

Dutta is among scores of Gen Z and millennials who use memes for their daily dose of humour amid busy work schedules. Their average time spent watching memes, says consulting firm RedSeer, is about 30 minutes a day. That’s why brands, especially new-age ones such as Zepto, Dunzo and Spotify, are increasingly depending on memes to market their products and services. Meme marketing is a low-cost method to appeal to a large audience. Popularity of memes means creative ads in this category get high engagement compared with usual brand content. At Dunzo, we've seen many of our simplest memes getting more audience interaction than fanciest of adverts,” says Tanveer Khan, general manager, brand marketing, Dunzo.

The market is big. MemeChat, one of the largest homegrown meme creation and networking platforms, generates about 1,00,000 memes in a day. A lot of people spend time and effort to create memes. Social media allows everyone to try their hands at content creation. This has paved the way for the rise of meme creation apps and platforms,” says a RedSeer note.

Brands say the biggest advantage of memes is that they market themselves due to high shareability. Memes are engaging and entertaining. They are the quickest form of dopamine hitting you. There’s a pull from the user,’ says Neha Ahuja, head of marketing at Spotify.