“Impact of Internet Memes on Brand Recognit...

“Impact of Internet Memes on Brand Recognition; a Study among Z Generation with Respect To Food Delivery Apps in India”

Author Name : Sourabh Mourya, Ripesh Singh, Dhruvin Kumar Chauhan

ABSTRACT

Internet memes has been a new tool of marketing these days. Theorised by famous biologist Richard Dawkins, it was considered to be topic not so persuasive for the scholars of those times to continue further research on this. But as the internet era emerged, people started using various methods of spreading information, memes being one of them. Eventually internet memes became as a virus as they spread fast and has the capacity to mutate according to various factors. As they started becoming a trend, they caught the eyes of marketers as a tool. Today many brands use it as a marketing and selling tool as it keeps evolving according to the time and is simple and cheap way of advertisement. The recent use of memes as a way of marketing and selling direct us towards the conclusion that brands are trying to tap the conscious and unconscious mind of the consumer and to create a sort of brand awareness through it. But the impact of meme marketing for longer period of time is still unknown as this technique is still new for the brands and memes are highly evolving in nature. The paper examines whether consumer (Z generation) identifies the brand with its cues in a meme and if this identification leads the consumers to recall its competitors too. 1067 response were collected from a self-administered questionnaire online which was sent to the people of age group 15-25, who has access to smartphones. The results reveal that the memes that contains a cue of the brand does create a brand recognition in the mind of consumers (Z generation).

Keywords: internet memes, brand recognition, meme marketing,