MEME MARKETING AND BRAND ENGAGEMENT AMONG SOCIAL MEDIA USERS

Memes have moved from the margins of internet humour to the centre of social media marketing, with brands increasingly adopting their imitative, humorous, and highly shareable formats to attract attention and build relationships with users. This paper examines meme marketing and brand engagement among social media users. It argues that memes can strengthen brand engagement when they are relevant to users’ identities, culturally fluent, and consistent with the brand’s positioning, but that these same qualities make memes a fragile and context-dependent marketing tool. Anchored on Uses and Gratifications Theory, the paper contends that users engage with branded memes actively and selectively, and that engagement follows from the extent to which such content satisfies needs for entertainment, social interaction, self-expression, and belonging. Drawing on recent empirical and conceptual literature, it reviews how humour, relatability, and perceived trendiness shape engagement; how platform dynamics and brand type condition outcomes; and what evidence from Nigeria suggests about the gap between attention and patronage. The paper advocates that brands treat memes as participatory conversation rather than disguised advertisements, invest in cultural and platform literacy, and adopt ethical and risk-management safeguards. It concludes that meme marketing is most effective when it earns engagement through genuine gratification rather than attempting to manufacture it. The paper contributes to contemporary debates by offering a user-centred, gratification-based explanation of brand engagement in the Nigerian and wider African social media environment