Investigation of Consumer Responses to Visual and Textual Elements of Meme Marketing Advertisements

Brands have started using internet memes as a marketing tool on social media to combat declining engagement rates among consumers. Despite increased adoption in professional practice, limited scholarly attention has been paid to meme marketing, or to the elements that may contribute to the success of memes intended as brand advertisements. Employing heuristic cues to facilitate peripheral cognitive processing and controlling for humor perception and advertising skepticism, two interrelated experiments investigate how ad type, brand identity, humor, and perceived popularity of a social media marketing post containing a meme influence consumer attitudes and behavioral intentions. Results indicate that consumers prefer ads in the form of humorous memes to text-only ads without memes. Brands with less serious identities and posts that are perceived as more popular also evince more favorable responses. These findings offer theoretical and practical insights into optimizing meme marketing engagement in content-saturated digital environments.