Meme Marketing

Yes it is a real form of marketing !
The word "meme" was coined by   Richard Dawkins' in his 1976 book  The Selfish Gene. Meme marketing is a subset of viral marketing, which uses social media for propagation.  So how do companies do it and do people like it?

Meme's tickle the funny bones of every person, if a brand is grounded to the current trends they can use it to their advantage like the #PrayForNesamani trend which many companies took advantage and promoted their brand.

How can this be effective, lets see some strategies followed by some leading companies.

This happened recently, an advertisement by a company called Peloton aired an ad and this caused a big buzz in the social media market. Now the company aviation gin took advantage of this buzz and marketed their product by creating an ad where the actress in the controversial ad is being comforted by friends over a glass of aviation gin.

So what was the peloton ad and the controversy, the ad starts by a husband gifting a stationary peloton bike for Christmas. This ad was misinterpreted by many as an act of a controlling husband who gifts an exercise bike for an already thin looking lady, and implying she needs to loose weight. It was a perfectly innocent ad focussed on increasing sales during the season, but got caught to current cultural sensitivity.

while people were divided in opinion whether it was sexist or perfectly normal gift for a husband to give, Ryan Renolyds brand Aviation Gin went ahead and created this ad to take advantage of the buzz and take a cheeky shot on the peloton bike company. the ads are below.


The peloton ad which created this controversy.

 

The Aviation gin ad which took advantage is below

Now if you see the way the brands have promoted their videos, Peloton said "The gift that keeps on givin" after it got caught in the controversy, aviation gin gave out the title"the gift that does not give back". Now that is timely marketing with a wicked sense of humour. 

These type of viral marketing needs a marketing team which is quick and keeps an eye on what is trending and when some thing happens which their brand can take advantage they do it immediately.

The above example is an one off situation where any trend which happens gives opportunity for promoting their brands. But this type of situations don't come very often so how can brands leverage memes to promote themselves. lets see some ways in which brands are doing this.

One brand which uses meme very frequently in India is Big Bazzar

Big Bazzar joined together with a popular social media page Rajinikant vs CID Jokes and took advantage of popular meme templates.

Pepsi also took advantage of popular template and sent out some memes.

 

The crux of taking memes for marketing is

1. Be quick enough to take advantage of any meme, don't let the moment pass
2. While being quick don't get into sticky situations or embarrass your brand (Taped Banana)
3. Do not over use a meme template (Jealous girlfriend)
4. Do no use a meme which has negative undertone (Pepe the frog)
5. Make sure your followers are able to understand the meaning

This is a new phase in marketing which is interesting as well as entertaining lets see where this leads us.

An Overview of Business Analytics - Descriptive, Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics

What is Business Analytics?

Analytics is the use of: data, information technology,   statistical analysis,  quantitative methods, and   mathematical or computer-based models  to help managers gain improved insight about their business operations and make better, fact-based decisions.

Business analytics is “a process of transforming data into actions through analysis and insights in the context of organizational decision making and problem solving.”

 

Business Analytics Applications

}Management of customer relationships

}Financial and marketing activities

}Supply chain management

}Human resource planning

}Pricing decisions

}Sport team game strategies

Evolution of Business Analytics

Much of modern business analytics stems from the analysis and solution of complex decision problems using mathematical or computer-based models—a discipline known as operations research, which was essentially a dicipline created due to necessacity duting world war. This was further developed into many management science disciplines for optimising business process. Then came the combination of mathemetical models and computer science which lead to Business Intelligence and that led to DSS and now it rests in its current position as a software available in personal computers.

Modern business analytics can be viewed as an integration of BI/IS, statistics, and modelling and optimization as illustrated in Figure.

}

Listed below are some of the important aspects of Business Analytics as shown in the figure

 Data Mining is focused on better understanding characteristics and patterns among variables in large databases using a variety of statistical and analytical tools. Many standard statistical tools as well as more advanced ones are used extensively in data mining.

Simulation and Risk Analysis relies on spreadsheet models and statistical analysis to examine the impacts of uncertainty in the estimates and their potential interaction with one another on the output variable of interest. Spreadsheets and formal models allow one to manipulate data to perform what-if analysis—how specific combinations of inputs that reflect key assumptions will affect model outputs.

 What-If Analysis is also used to assess the sensitivity of optimization models to changes in data inputs and provide better insight for making good decisions.

Visualization- Visualizing data and results of analyses provide
a way of easily communicating data at all levels of a business and can reveal surprising patterns and relationships.

Tools used in Business Analytics:

A wide variety of tools are used to support business analytics. These include:

• Database queries and analysis
• Dashboards
• Data visualization
• Statistical methods
• Spreadsheets and predictive models
• Scenario and “what-if” analyses
• Simulation
• Forecasting
• Data and text mining
• Optimization
• Social media, Web, and text analytics 

Descriptive, Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics

Business analytics begins with the collection, organization, and manipulation of data and is supported by three major components:

1. Descriptive Analytics
2. Predictive Analytics
3. Prescriptive Analytics

S.No		Descriptive analytics	Predictive analytics	Prescriptive analytics
1	Definition	The use of data to understand past and current business performance and make informed decisions.	Predictive analytics seeks to predict the future by examining Historical data, detecting patterns or relationships in these data, and then extrapolating these relationships forward in time.	Prescriptive analytics factors information about possible situations or scenarios, available resources, past performance, and current performance, and suggests a course of action or strategy.
2	Hierarchy	Descriptive Analytics is the first part of any model building exercise. We analyze the historical data to identify patterns and trends of the dependent and independent variables.	Predictive Analytics is the next stage of analytics. Here, we leverage the cleaned and/or transformed data and fit a model on that data to predict the future behavior of the dependent variable.	Prescriptive Analytics is the last stage where the predictions are used to prescribe (or recommend) the next set of things to be done.
3	Process	Categorize, characterize, consolidate, and classify data to convert it into useful information for the purposes of understanding and analyzing business performance.	Using advanced techniques, predictive analytics can help to detect hidden patterns in large quantities of data to segment and group data into coherent sets to predict behaviour and detect trends.	Prescriptive analytics relies on artificial intelligence techniques, such as machine learning, to understand and advance from the data it acquires, adapting all the while.
4	Output	This process allows managers to obtain standard and customized reports and then drill down into the data and make queries to understand the impact of an advertising campaign, for example, review business performance to find problems or areas of opportunity, and identify patterns and trends in data.	This process allows a bank manager to identify the most profitable customers Or predict the chances that a loan applicant will default, or alert a credit-card customer to a potential fraudulent charge.	Prescriptive analytics is used in many areas of business, including  operations, marketing, and finance. For example, we may determine the best pricing and advertising strategy to maximize revenue, the optimal amount of cash to store in ATMs.
5	Application	Typical questions that descriptive analytics helps answer are “How much did we sell in each region?” “What was our revenue and profit last quarter?”	Predictive analytics helps to answer questions such as “What will happen if demand falls by 10% or if supplier prices go up 5%?” “What do we expect to pay for fuel over the next several months?” “What is the risk of losing money in a new business venture?”	Prescriptive analytics addresses questions such as “How much should we produce to maximize profit?” “What is the best way of shipping goods from our factories to minimize costs?” “Should we change our plans if a natural disaster closes a supplier’s factory: if so, by how much?”
6	Practical Usage	Descriptive analytics can help to identify the areas of strength and weakness in an organization.	Predictive analytics look at patterns in data to determine if those patterns are likely to emerge again, which allows businesses and investors to adjust where they use their resources to take advantage of possible future events.	Prescriptive analytics can simulate the probability of various outcomes and show the probability of each, helping organizations to better understand the level of risk and uncertainty they face than they could be relying on averages.

Comparative Advertising - AD Wars by Amul

"AMUL"  one of the most loved brands in India is known for its innovative and cheeky advertisements which makes everyone go aww. But a recent comparative advertisement which it released on print and social media caused a small AD war.

So what is this comparative advertising?

According to Investopedia Comparative advertising is a marketing strategy in which a company's product or service is presented as superior when compared to a competitor's. A comparative advertising campaign may involve printing a side-by-side comparison of the features of a company's products next to those of its competitor. 

This advertisement is what caused it all

A simple innocent looking question

 "Does your butter cookie contain butter or vegetable oil?"

You can read the original tweet by clicking on this link.

  This created a lot of interaction online and many started posting their own content of different brands of biscuits and complained.

Every brand of biscuit which claimed as butter cookie was dragged in by the consumers, this was further enhanced by the contest which was titled as #AmulButterCookie challenge which made people tweet out with comparative images.

This is not the first time when Amul has done comparative advertising; it has earlier done it for its ice-cream range, where it asked whether you are having ice-cream or frozen dessert. It was taking advantage of a regulatory rule which listed products made from vegetable oil as frozen dessert. 

Not only Amul but Havmor icecreams also sent out a cheeky ad targeting frozen desserts.

HUL was not humoured and it approached the courts and argued the advertisement was disparaging its product and got an injunction against the advertisement which it prominently displays in its webpage, along with the comparision chart of process of making frozen desserts and ice-creams.

But In this case of butter cookies, Amul has met its match in Britannia , they turned the tables on Amul and put forward to customers how much fat will they consume in this ad.

They ended with this tag saying

 "Too Much Butter may not always be better."

Now this is what we require in a good ad war. Lets see how it progresses....

#GoBackModi - Pakistan or Tamil Nadu who trends it?

Love Him or Hate Him you cannot ignore him. Mr. Narendra Modi has this polarising effect on people. The PR team of Indian government has done an excellent job of promoting the PM's Image as a person who loves Tamil Tradition.

The carefully curated Tweets, in tamil

The  selection of food menu to showcase Southern Cuisine

 Summit Menu 

And most importantly the optics, a prime minister in perfect dhoti and angavastram.

Everything is going on well where can it go wrong.

Enter the Tamilians, the villans where some of them started trending #GoBackModi

and #GoBackModiWelcomeXiJinping. Now they went even more a step ahead and trended in mandarin #回到莫迪 . The Spin Narrative : It would still not have been a big issue for PR, as it could have been credited to political opponents who are trending. The governments PR team did a bad move where they started circulating a fake Hastag analysis saying 40% of tweets is from Pakistan. Now this is something a hare brained scheme from some amateur who has no idea of Twitter and Hashtag analytics. Some news papers have also picked this up and published news reports.

North east times

times of India report

Republic Report

Twitter Influencers folly:

The Twitter Influencers who are pro-Modi started to pick this up and trended the tweets which suspected Pakistan angle, and some regional newspapers also followed it.

Twitter users were quick to burst this narrative when people started their own analysis of the trend and further burst the myth. a twitter user made a detailed trend analysis and posted the result, which you can read here https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182865025213575169.html

So what did the PR Team did wrong?

• Simple, when you have negative sentiments towards your subject, you try to minimise the attention. So they should have ignored #GoBackModi
• If you plan on reducing the impact do a counter narrative #TNWelcomesModi, In this case this did not work as, the trend was inorganic and most handles promoting it was from affiliates of BJP.
• If nothing works you should be silent and wait for the trend to end naturally, it would have ended in two days, here the PR team did a great blunder and planted this story about Pakistan angle which made this trend even more popular. 

To Summarize the mood of people in one tweet, you should look at this exchange which happened between Rajdeep Sardesai and a twitter user

Edit On 14-12-2020

So I came across this new website called https://hashtagify.me/ so it offered some new tools, so I tried this tool on this #GoBackModi and the results are below.

So It settles, most of the tweets are from Tamil Nadu, Kerala and other southern states. 

#BoycottMillennials - An analysis - Is this a PR Failure

This is not a political post, now that the issue is out of the way lets check if this trend #BoycottMillennials is a Public Relations failure of Indian Government.

The first term of Narendra Modis government got over with euphoria that a Nationalist government was in place, #Demonitization #GST #Petrol #Diesel price hike and #Rafale was all forgotten and forgiven. Then came the big victory for the second term, this promised to be a big reformist period where all problems will be solved. But recent days the events in public  domain makes me wonder does the Indian government has a PR department, do they advice MPs and Ministers to properly address the media. 

The most recent headline which caused a big backlash

"Millennial mindset of using Ola, Uber is adversely affecting auto sector: FM"  

It caused a  trend  #BoycottMillennials there was also another associated trend 

#SayItLikeNirmalaTai these trends are a PR nightmare, not only were they sarcastic about the current statement but also they linked all the past failures of the government.

• Aviation Industry crisis
• Real Estate crisis
• Parle G production shutdown
• Roti Namak in Midday meals
• Stock Market fall
• Unorganised sector job loss
• Highest Unemployment rate

A small glimpse of the various tweets, most of it is from users who are known for their satire but majority of the tweets with less engagement was from relatively unknown handles of common people. this is a huge PR disaster for  the government as the common man starts mocking because even they can identify the spin doctors.

There was around 61 news posts about this trend #BoycottMillennials and 371 posts on twitter around the time I created the tracker.

So I wanted to find if there is any related hashtag and when I checked the dashboard I got this a word cloud #SayItLikeNirmalaTai and some other tags. The essence is people correlate economic situation with a satire tweet trend which is not good for the consumer confidence.

The PR Failure:

I believe the public relations team of Indian Government has failed bigtime, when people are anxious about growth and jobs many ministers and MPs are shooting of their mouth and causing doubts whether this government is serious about addressing the economic crisis. The finance Minister was unlucky as the statement created a huge furore, but taking into account the past interactions of ministers with media and the callous manner economic questions were answered I can sympathise with the #Millennials as they feel angry. 

It is not a PR Failure:

So when I floated this idea that this social media trend is a PR failure, there was another contrary view presented by the alternate thinkers , government giving space to this trend itself is a diversionary tactic. The best way to hide a scandal is diversion by making an outlandish statement which diverts attention. This is also possible as every time there is a serious issue one outlandish statement will be uttered by the MP or minister and we would focus our attention over that. 

So either way this presents an unique chance for us to observe how PR is being managed by the  Indian Government and also analyse how people react and interact to these statements.

I have created a real time tracker for this trend so you can keep a view of this hashtag.