“Meme, Meme on The Phone- can every audience make you their own?”, boomed master Meme’s voice.
“You’re relatable, often funny, sometimes hard-hitting, and highly appreciated your highness.” Meme nodded with pride at The Phone’s response.
“So you’re saying everybody loves me?” asked Meme to The Phone.
“Ehh.. well you see your high…” began The Phone.
“Say everybody loves me”, snarled back Meme.
“Your highness, people love you, yes they do, but not everybody. I…I can explain” pleaded The Phone.
The Phone’s voice was left abandoned as Meme exited the room flushing with anger. From the very first step it put into the digital world Meme gained sudden fame and fortune and the audience showered it with love. What worked best in its favour was its friendship with pop culture, music, cinema, and trends in the entertainment industry in addition to having various emotions attached to it and its ease of consumption. While Meme was relevant for almost everyone, the younger generation grew closest to them. They created a Meme language and made it a way of communication for regular conversations, marketing, and more.
Soon a new title in the marketing world was born: Meme-Jacking. It referred to viral memes created by social media consumers being used by brands to engage with their audiences. Meme-jacking grew popular given the meme’s existing virality and the instant connection it could build with the consumers. Seeing new titles being given to it, Meme’s conceit grew. It was now omnipresent and began to consider itself one of the most powerful members of the digital world.
Meme’s life was successful, until that one time….. the one time when a set of audience did not react to its presence. Not that they did not understand it, but Meme was not relevant to them. The information they were looking to consume was not well shared. It spent the day in the gloom, thinking hard about what went wrong. For once Meme called the setback the consumers’ lack of knowledge about the recent trends, then shook the idea off thinking they’re too old to be pleased by it. One of the many theories was also the fact that Meme spoke with few words, while another one pointed at it looking too casual. “Well I’m not here to please talkative people or serious corporate slaves”, thought Meme shrugging off the theories. In the rage of fame little did it realise that Meme was actually creating a list of reasons why people would partner with it in the long run despite its popularity. At this point, having made a place in communications across platforms, formats, industries, languages, and generations, Meme was in the midst of everywhere, yet nowhere. What did it start as - a fun conversation or a marketing tool, an easy way to build connections or a way to cut short conversations? Meme had lost its vision.
Meme had made it a practice to visit The Phone to hear of its glories in the digital world presented by the likes, shares, comments, and other engagements. This time, however, the trip was for reassurance. Meme believed it still had the flame to rule all communications, but The Phone told it otherwise. Now as Meme stepped out of The Phone’s room it recollected the words told to it by other marketing tools, ”you can’t be loved by all, so focus on getting all the love from those handfuls who accept you.” It recollected the discarded theories of why it may have failed, decided to brace them and work on being the best version of what it already was. It decided to grow more diverse - across emotions, timespans, and trends. It decided to follow one vision- to be relatable rough to instantly build a connection.
“I have to be okay to not be accepted by all or even be accepted equally by those who do. I have to embrace the reality that I too can fall flat on my face, but remember that I am not a failure. I have to choose my wars as brands choose their target audiences as not all are under our control”, Meme affirmed itself.