Join the Conversation: Understanding and Leveraging the Effect of Internet-meme

Internet meme (pronounced as “meem”) refers to a piece of information that quickly spreads through the internet and brings a craze of sharing and imitation among a large scale of netizens. The word meme, named analogous to gene, was first introduced by Richard Dawkins (1989). Dawkins posits that while genes are one kind of replicator that spreads from body to body, memes are another type of replicator that propagates from mind to mind. Examples of a meme could be an idea, a phrase, a picture, or a short video. A meme must catch extent attention to replicate itself and spread wide to stay “alive", and internet is a place that visualizes this spreading process in which people (and also a company) can take a participative role (in diffusing a meme). Thus internet memes are ideal content vehicles for marketers to disseminate their advertisements, products, and brands. Numerous companies are conducting internet-meme marketing in practice. For instance, Haier is very famous for diffusing and discussing internet memes with online consumers in various of social network platforms such as Sina Weibo, Twitter, and Facebook (businessfornight.com, 2016), and Gucci posted a series of pictures combining its new products with internet memes in its official Instagram account (Thompsonmar, 2017). We notice that internet-meme marketing campaigns are prevalent and have attracted considerable companies' and media's interest, but surprisingly, there is no empirical marketing research investigating this phenomenon. This research aims at understanding consumer's perceptions and reactions toward internet-meme marketing campaigns and investigating the corresponding ways that marketers could leverage these effects. Specifically, we propose that leveraging internet memes would enhance consumer-brand closeness (compared to no-meme is leveraged). When a brand is joining the conversations of consumers, they would feel having more connections with the brand, and thus feel closer with it. We further propose four moderators to enrich our understanding of internet-meme marketing.