The meme takeover

The Harlem Shake and Gangnam Style spread like wildfire on our screens earlier this year. But are brands that are cashing in on these latest crazes being lazy or cleverly responding to a cultural phenomenon?

Everyone has jumped on the bandwagon – Topshop’s version of the Harlem Shake involved newest supermodel on the block, Cara Delevingne and reached over 1.4 million views on YouTube. Electric cigarettes brand, Elites, featured a baby taking his first steps before breaking into Gangnam Style and has been viewed 1.7 million times. 

Not everyone has got it right. Pepsi’s Harlem Shake edition was met with criticism for killing off the trend by making it too corporate and overtly promotional, whilst Wonderful Pistachio’s take on the dance craze, aired at the Super Bowl, was only the 20^th most shared advert of the event.

Memes are nothing new, but the increase of their online exposure is. Within three days, the amount of Harlem Shake videos online increased from 12,000 to 40,000 and had accumulated 175 million views. 

Memes also have a very short life span at when they are most effective. Brands that have come out on top have been quick to react to the latest trend and have captured the collective imagination as a result. Although Ask.com pre-empted criticism of their two-week late reincarnation with the pre-fix message, “Yeah, yeah, we know. We just couldn’t pass up the biggest meme of the week”, the 12,000 views generated hardly constituted viral success. 

A great advert doesn’t have to stem from a craze though. Take the Evian adverts for example. The inaugural edition of the award-winning ‘Roller Babies’ advert back in 2009 has a record 67 million views online – the most ever for an ad, holding a Guinness World Record. Now, there’s no such thing as an original idea, but what Evian did was no doubt clever and creative. Even the use of babies wasn’t new (Etrade babies golfed in adverts) but Evian’s was amusing, entertaining and puzzling – some could say some of the babies were slightly creepy.  

The water brand is hoping to beat its own record with this year’s advert ‘Baby & Me’. Launched a couple of weeks ago, the advert follows the same, fun loving approach as the 2009 ad, channelling the brand’s ‘live young’ strapline. A group of adults dance around in front of a reflective shop window and discover their reflections are, in fact, baby versions of themselves. The advert has received over 45 million views to date. It seems that, for the public, a good advert needs to be memorable, not meme full.

By Stephanie Rock 

Battle of the Brands

Burger King or McDonald’s. Be it on a long-haul bus journey or in a slightly inebriated state late at night, it’s a conversation we’ve all had. Which side of the fence you fall may not define your entire character, but it certainly pigeonholes you in terms of chip preference.

Competition amongst brands is now so ingrained into our consumer consciousness that we take it as verbatim. We understand Burger King’s rivalry with McDonald’s as the fast-food equivalent of Lex Luthor vs Superman. Adidas and Nike are the Saxons and Normans of the sporting world, whilst the fight between Blackberry and Apple seems as old as that between tortoise and hare.

Nevertheless, these great brand battles are not organically born. Yes consumers will naturally compare brands which produce similar products within a similar price range, but it is clever marketing from the brands themselves which positions them as mortal enemies. With a little careful manipulation, consumer preference can become fierce allegiance and indifference turned to disgust.

In the Metro this week, Ross McGuiness wrote an article documenting the competitive marketing history of Coca-Cola and Pepsi. McGuiness traced the rivalry right back to 1936, when a recession damaged Pepsi-Cola decide to take a pop at its pricier competitor.

Almost seven decades later, and it seems that the rise of social media and the consequent multiplication of marketing platforms has only intensified the Pepsi-Coke rivalry. Brand allegiance is now not only encouraged through competitive pricing, but through fully integrated campaigns that use social media to create comprehensive and contrasting brand images. Last month Coca-cola announced a partnership with Spotify, whilst Pepsi introduced Pepsi pulse; an entertainment curation platform built into the brand’s website.

So far so good. Pepsi and Coca-Cola are by no means faultless brands, but at least competition between the two seems focused on offering their consumers more.

Other brands use competitive marketing less successfully though, and to the potential detriment of their brand image. I see the recent guerilla marketing stunt, staged in Australia by Blackberry makers, RIM, as illustrative of this. The ‘Wake-Up’ campaign sought to position the Blackberry OS 10 as a competitor to the iPhone 4S through a sequence of flashmob protests, including one staged outside the Apple store in Sydney.

Now in my opinion this campaign had one very glaring problem: It demanded consumers ‘Wake-Up’ and abandon their allegiance to Apple and their iPhones, without providing them any real incentive to do so. The campaign was so focused on dismissing its competition that it seemed to forget its promotional objective in the process.

Competitive marketing is not a bad thing. It can turn a brand into a talking point, define its positioning and turn consumers into faithful fans. Nevertheless, if the RIM debacle can teach marketers one thing it’s this; competition is not the be all and end all- it’s the competitor that counts.

By Polly Robinson