I’ve been obsessed with a Honda dealer in the American town of Wilsonville, Oregon, all week. I had to look it up: it is close to Portland and Seattle and has about 26,000 inhabitants. By way of comparison: my home town of Schiedam has eighty thousand inhabitants.
I was brain dead last week staring at the images presented to me by my Instagram algorithm. One video in particular made me chuckle. In the video, shared by ‘Honda Wilsonville’, I saw the car shop in all its glory, until a giant cat emerged from behind the roof and started swinging to a dorky tune. The cameo appearance was from the famous chubby meme cat named Maxwell. It read: “When management says messages should remain related to the dealership.” The combination of an anything-but-sexy car brand and funny cat made for a perfectly balanced meme. A Gen Z guy writes under the message that whoever runs the page obviously knows what they are doing.
I saw that this post was copied a few days later by Mercedes-Benz Atlanta-South and BMW Arlington, with much less success and likes. Logical, because the formula was no longer correct with a sexy car brand in the composition.
Uncomfortable
You also see meme marketing in the Netherlands. For example, Bol.com only shares pictures with silly jokes and puns on Instagram. For example, a photo of a dog chew stick accompanied by the text: “We are a little busy. So here’s a stick photo from the internet. Takkesaai.” Coolblue does the same: “fan, win-wind situation”.
The Irish budget airline Ryanair knows herself what she does to her travelers with her miserable flights: “I will never fly with Ryanair again! – see flash sale.” The character in the video immediately packs her suitcase.
Successful or not, the use of memes for commercial purposes remains an uncomfortable phenomenon. Memes are inherently non-commercial because they are public information carriers on the Internet. Ownership does not matter and there is no intellectual property (with the exception of a few cases). Once the images of Maxwell the cat hit the internet as a meme, they are available to everyone – like the public city benches of the world wide web. Anyone who wants can use it for free.
In addition, most memes are an allegorical means of expression for young people who want to share their feelings and experiences with each other. If a marketing department with adults dares to participate in this, it can miss the mark.
Like the VVD. Above one photo of a skeleton on a bench is the text: “If you would wait with nuclear energy until GroenLinks sees the light.” Or like GroenLinks; an edited photo shows a smiling Mark Rutte taking a spontaneous selfie at a forest fire on the social media platform BeReal. The meme responds to last summer’s heat records and questions climate policy.
The result of this political feud fought with memes is a cringeworthy attempt to be ‘cool and hip’, much like the uncle suddenly forcing “cool cool, man” out of his throat at the younger cousins.
But if you do it right, like the Wilsonville Honda dealer who sells mid-range Japanese cars, you’ll get the attention of someone like me. And I don’t even have a driver’s license.