Meme Marketing: Leveraging Digital Culture to Strengthen Brand Presence in Established and Emerging Markets

This research examines the effect of meme familiarity, their novelty, complexity, and compatibility with the brand, regarding awareness, consumer attitudes, and purchase intentions in the Greek market. This study is based on Berlyne's Theory of Aesthetic Pleasure, which posits that consumers derive pleasure from brands that are aesthetical. If one were to judge the Greek meme "Konstantinou & Elenis" and the American meme "Psych" would suggest that the former would be more compatible with the audience in the Greek market and cultural context. And that is exactly the results of this study. The findings establish that favorable brand sentiments, cultivated through meme marketing, translate to purchase intentions. The investigation revealed no significant moderation of the relationship between meme familiarity and brand attitudes based on demographics such as age or gender. However, the study did find that engagement with social media has an impact on how consumers perceive and consider brands. This research is part of the ever expanding digital marketing field and aims to explore an area not fully developed in this field. Much of the previous work on memes focused on their use in social movements or as a research tool in the humanities. This was given the growing use of memes in advertising and marketing. Memes have been around in some form or another since the invention of the printing press, and even before that. Their use has undoubtedly increased since the advent of the internet in general and social media in particular, but the scholarly literature on the subject is still quite thin. And what there is mostly looks at the memes themselves instead of at what the memes are doing.