Do you know what the average lifespan of a meme is?

It’s about a month. Meme lifespans are decreasing, too. They are down from about six weeks in 2018. And if we go back further, some memes lasted years (looking at you, Dos Equis Man). As the means to create and share memes continue to grow across Reddit, YouTube and TikTok, the lifespan of these digital trends continue to drop, replaced by the newest flavor of the moment.

Brands often look to the memesphere for immediate relevancy and a spike in attention. It makes sense; however, these things are rarely campaign driven but more focused on capitalizing on trends, which are rooted in immediacy and most often not connected to strategy. Unfortunately, this can lead to dead ends and empty results. There’s undoubtedly room for trends here, but marketers often struggle with ways to contextualize and rationalize this kind of marketing activity.

Abandon anything and everything for the chance to catch a ray of warm pop culture sunlight before it moves on to the next shiny moment.

Who could forget the infamous Spaghettio’s Pearl Harbour tweet that spawned countless memes? While rooted less in ‘trends,’ there is undoubtedly a line crossed in favor of attempting to access the moment’s sentiment. Trends might be the marketer’s worst nightmare from that perspective. Abandon anything and everything for the chance to catch a ray of warm pop culture sunlight before it moves on to the next shiny moment. Of course, capitalizing on trends is hardly a plan, but it’s surprising just how many brands attempt to do this to varying degrees.

It’s that kind of activity that gets our attention at CULT, and here’s why:

We’ve dedicated a lot of our capabilities to identifying cult-like brands’ traits. Just like you, we’re fascinated by how they work and what the factors are that help contribute to cult-like status. We use those shared principles to help shape cult-like brand behaviors around the clients we work with.

Here’s the funny part – Brands that attempt to jump on trends and rent some cult-like brand behavior often fall flat and actually end up contributing to killing off the very meme they are emulating. While truly cult-like brands never do this kind of thing because they simply don’t have to.

So what’s a brand to do? How can a brand look to gain attention without resorting to memes or trends and build long-term engagement with its audiences? There’s a system to do this. It’s called Marketing Mix Modeling, and it’s a cure for memes.

Marketing Mix Modeling identifies the required tactics that brands can deploy to actually engage these audiences, but it does something really powerful from a business perspective, too. Marketing Mix Modeling ties these tactics to a direct and solid line of business outcomes that measure the impact of these tactics.

Marketing Mix Modeling is not only a layer of insight into marketing activities but also reflects how those specific tactics will impact the business from a financial and operations perspective. It tells us what to do and what the impact of doing it will be in a measurable way.

Marketing Mix Modeling is not only a layer of insight into marketing activities but also reflects how those specific tactics will impact the business from a financial and operations perspective. It tells us what to do and what the impact of doing it will be in a measurable way.

1. Brand revenue: how much does brand contribute to revenue?

2. What are the proper KPIs to measure brand that links to business performance?

3. What combination of marketing investments and messaging will deliver the highest business results?

4. Do I have the exemplary brand architecture to support the brand?

5. What non-marketing factors and business units are impacting the brand’s financial performance?