Memetics can help us understand why. Unfortunately, “meme” is a term that gets thrown around a lot without much thought. People often use it to denote something they think is new and cool, but that misses the point entirely.
Understanding how memes work can help us understand how both good and bad ideas get spread.
What’s a meme?
The term meme was originally coined in Richard Dawkins classic book, The Selfish Gene. Simply put, it’s something that replicates information. Just as genes replicate genetic data, memes replicate cultural ideas.
The first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony are a meme as are famous advertising slogans like, “Just Do It” or “Where’s the Beef?” Other memes are longer, like the Magna Carta or the US Constitution and some can be fairly technical, like Google’s PageRank algorithm.
Like genes, some memes are more successful than others. Some, like Google’s algorithm, get copied because they are useful. Others, such as David Beckham’s haircut, hitch a ride with other memes (i.e. playing sports) that they are bundled with.
Understanding how and why memes get replicated is an essential marketing function.
Two hunters
Memes can spread in lots of different ways for lots of different reasons. Susan Blackmore, in her book The Meme Machine, describes how altruism can spread memes through a story about two successful primitive hunters, Kev and Gav. Kev, is a nice guy who shares his meat while Gav is a bit more selfish and keeps the proceeds from his hunt to himself.
Blackmore notes that Kev will come into contact with more people and they will be more likely to copy his style of hunting (i.e. type of bow and quiver, etc.). Moreover, other memes of his will be transferred as well, such as the type of feathers he adorns himself with, songs he likes to sing, etc..
Gav’s memes won’t be as successful. He won’t spend as much time with others so, whatever his merits, he won’t get copied as much as Kev. As information gets passed down, future generations will be more likely to adopt Kev’s memes than Gav’s.
Google, Microsoft and Apple
Google has tried very hard to be like Kev. Despite the occasional gaffe, they make an effort to be collaborative. They routinely give tours of their campus, are polite in meetings and do more than most companies to build cooperative relationships (at least in my experience).
Microsoft has a history of being more like Gav (although they do seem to have changed their tune in past years). This earned them enmity among the Silicon Valley digeratti, which made for a very poor product pipeline as well as a long and costly anti-trust battle.
Apple, as I wrote in an earlier post about Steve Jobs, is a bit of both. They are extremely user focused product wise, but Jobs’ overbearing personality creates problems for them. As the Ad Contrarian pointed out, a minor backlash has already started.
The important thing to note is that all three spread their memes successfully. Google though openness, Microsoft through some fantastic strategic decisions and Apple through inspiring products. Just as different genes are fit for different environments, memes can thrive for different reasons.
Search engine memes
Sergei Brin and Larry Page of Google have built an enormous business out of memes. They noticed that academic memes were not spread only by one paper citing another, but that the cites themselves became important. The more a paper was mentioned in other papers, the more important it was considered to be, which would lead to more readers and more references.
They built their search engine algorithm, called PageRank, on the same principle. The more links a page gets from other web pages, the higher it will appear in search results. So just like Kev sharing his meat helped spread his ideas, now companies share information to help spread their product memes.
Take Nike’s site. Of course, you can buy their products there, but they also have plenty of information about sports that isn’t directly related to anything they sell. The result: nearly 10,000 links and very good traffic results (I would assume great sales as well).
The PageRank meme has considerably changed the way other memes get spread.
Social memes
A while back, I wrote a post about social search which raised another memetic issue: Why was PageRank so successful? At the time Google launched, Jon Klienberg of Cornell University had already developed the HITS algorithm, which many consider to be superior to PageRank (and has since been implemented into Ask.com and the Google Wonderwheel).
PageRank memes moved further and faster in the context of Silicon Valley; populated with a robust network of venture capital people, entrepreneurs and early adopters. HITS, developed by a university professor in the small city of Ithaca, New York was mainly circulated in academic journals.
As social media continues to develop, memes are not only circulating more efficiently, we can see where they go and how. It’s as if Kev not only sat around telling hunting stories, but could then go see who repeated them. This will revolutionize how we evaluate the memes we want to invest in.
Content memes
I previously argued that content will stay free based on the economic reasoning that consumers have historically been more valuable to advertisers than content has been to consumers. I also pointed out that there is nothing to indicate that this has changed or will change in the future.
However, there is also a good memetic reason why advertising is a very effective way of financing content. The reason that information wants to be free is that memes want to be successful (because ones that aren’t don’t survive).
A great example is The New York Times previous paywall, called Times Select, which made some content (like columnists) a premium service that had to be paid for. While some people (like me) actually did subscribe, the columnists lost influence and revolted. More recently, The London Times added a paywall and immediately lost two thirds of its audience.
For memes to survive, they need to replicate and spread.
Synaptic memes
Of course, the main vehicle for spreading memes is our own brains. We see and hear things, remember them and pass them on. Of course, we forget most of the memes we come across. There are just too many memes competing for our attention for them all to be successful.
Scientists now have a pretty good idea how this happens. (See Advertising on the Brain). We remember memes that are either repeated a lot, which takes a lot of money and effort, or those that are highly emotional. Put a human face on a banner and you are sure to get more clicks.
It’s safe to assume that people remembered more about Kev’s hunts that were fraught with danger than the others. This is a good example of how genes and memes interact. Those who carry memes that are useful for survival tend to live on and pass on their genes.
How to use memes
Memes, like genes, don’t really exist, at least not in the sense that they can be generally defined with any specificity. It is their function that distinguishes them, not their structure; and their function is to propagate themselves.
For all the mindless debate about traditional vs. digital, push vs. pull and branding vs. direct response, the reality is that memes have a variety of ways to achieve their goal. Just as the title of Dawkin’s book suggests, it helps to think of memes as selfish, and our product memes don’t want to be held hostage to our marketing memes.
As marketers, we often lose sight of the difference. For whatever attractions a particular marketing channel might have for us, it is the success of our products that determines the success of our strategy, not the other way around.
Greg Satell is a blogger and a consultant at the Americal online media Digital Tonto. You can read his blog entries at http://www.digitaltonto.com
