Brand Positioning: Meme's the Word

Published in Marketing Intelligence and Planning: January 2002.

Summary: This paper illustrates how memetics, the Darwinian science of culture and creativity, can be used to enhance brand positioning. Using a simple but powerful technique of memetic analysis, it is shown how marketers can unpack how brands are actually positioned in the minds of consumers in terms of their component memes, that is, their ‘genes of meaning’. A demonstration of the validity and reliability of memetic analysis is given through an investigation of how the notion of ‘healthy-living’ is positioned in the minds of consumers. The practical utility of memetic analysis in brand positioning is discussed, and the possibility is raised of using the analytical tool to increase profitability by ‘memetically modifying’ brands with true, unique and compelling consumer values.

Key Words: Brand Positioning, Meme, Memetics, Memetic Analysis

Introduction: The Psychology of Brand Positioning
In today’s over-communicated and product saturated consumer world, effective positioning can be critical to brand success. ‘Positioning’ may be simply defined in terms of how a brand is positioned in the mind of the consumer with respect to the values with which it is differentially associated or ‘owns’ (Ries and Trout 1982, Marsden 2000). For example, the association of ‘safety’ with Volvo may describe a de facto positioning in the mind of many consumers that has the capacity to render Volvo more or less attractive. In this way, the commercial utility of positioning lies in how the imbibing of trademarks with unique, true and compelling values can influence purchasing decisions and impact upon sales. Indeed, the entire enterprise of branding itself can be understood as an exercise in positioning; using product experience and marketing initiatives to increase profitability by associating trademarks with compelling consumer values.

Although the craft of positioning is a defining function of modern branding, the idea of positioning dates back to Classical Greece, with Plato's assertion that memories evoke related memories, thus colouring interpretation (cf. Warren 1916). In the 17th and 18th Centuries, the British empiricists elaborated the Aristotelian notion that ideas are stored in memory by association, developing the three 'Laws of Association'; similarity, contrast and contiguity. In this view, the positioning of a concept in the associative structure of memory defines the meaning of that concept, allowing complex concepts to be constructed out of associative combinations of simpler concepts. Indeed, modern psychology makes much of this insight into the associative structure of human memory and this distributed understanding of meaning, using associative techniques to identify how an idea is positioned in the mind in order to unpack its subjective meaning (Galton 1880, Freud 1924, Deese 1965, Anderson and Bower 1973, Szalay and Deese 1978, Wagner, Valencia and Elejabarreieta 1996, Marsden 2000a).

In sum, how an idea is positioned in the associative networks of memory may be seen as describing the meaning of that idea for its holder. For example, the associative ‘mind map’ in Figure 1 can be seen as unpacking a subjective meaning of ‘Healthy Living’ through its neighbouring associations. These neighbouring associations are effectively what the linguist George Zipf called ‘genes of meaning’ (Zipf 1965), known today as ‘memes’ (pronounced so as to rhyme with ‘genes’). Memes, as coined by Richard Dawkins to denote units of memory, culturally analogous to genes (Dawkins 1976[i], Dennett 1991, Plotkin 1994, Marsden 2000a), can be simply understood here as nodes in the associative networks of memory. Like a kind of semantic DNA, clusters of memes in the semantic networks of memory provide a recipe of meaning, allowing us to imbibe objects, including trademarks, with meaning (Bollen 1996, Bollen and Heylighen 1998, Marsden and Bollen 1999, Marsden 2000 cf. Collins and Loftus 1975, Berkowitz and Rogers 1986, Sowa 1991, Jo and Berkowitz 1994, Law and Lodge 1984).
 

Figure 1: Associative networks as ‘semantic DNA’

The relevance of memes to marketers is that they can be mapped and used to audit how brands are positioned in the minds of consumers, providing valuable insight that can inform marketing initiatives. To take a simple example, if a category leader, such as Federal Express is found to ‘own’ by association the meme ‘overnight’ with customers, then a competitor will know that success will depend on positioning their alternative brand against ‘overnight’, offering something unique and compelling. This task could be helped by unpacking the meaning of ‘overnight’ into its own component memes in order to provide an understanding into what ‘overnight’ actually means to customers. One non-negligible advantage of this memetic approach is that it is quick and succinct. For instance, simple associative techniques in research could identify and unpack Volvo’s dominant defining meme of ‘safety’, capturing the essence of what many hours of alternative investigation and lengthy research reports may take to uncover.

If there has been a problem with using memetic analysis to inform brand positioning, it is the methodological issue of integrating the associative chains of memes made by individuals, often quite idiosyncratic, into some coherent map that reflects the dominant mindset of a whole target population. Fortunately, the daunting prospect of having to sift through hundreds of discrepant and idiosyncratic association chains made by individual consumers can be simply obviated by elementary database technology and the helping hand of a friendly IT department. By feeding individual chains of associations made by consumers around a brand-related concept into a database pre-programmed to automatically create or reinforce links between associations, the database can ‘learn’ and build a blueprint, iteratively and ground up, of the dominant and representative associative chains made by that population. The result is a ‘meme map’ that captures and unpacks the meaning of a brand-related concept as it exists within a population’s collective mindset (Marsden 2000a, cf. Zerabuvel 1997). Methodologically speaking, the generation of such meme maps is simply an automated application of ‘grounded theory’; an established qualitative research approach designed to generate models of meaning through iterative loops of data integration and analysis (Glaser and Strauss 1967, Becker 1993, Pidgeon 1996, Pidgeon and Henwood 1996). A simple conceptual specification for the production of meme maps designed to capture and unpack the positioning of brands in some target population is provided in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Specification for meme mapping a collective mindset

Memetic Analysis: How ‘Healthy Living’ is positioned in the mind of the consumer
Sponsored by the research-based creative consultancy Brand Genetics, a meme map was generated at the University of Sussex in August 2000 that sequenced the meaningful positioning of the idea of ‘Healthy Living’ within a research population. UK and US adult consumers were invited by chain email to play a simple online word association game (Figure 3), and after two weeks 142 people had completed the game, with each participant having made nine associations. By linking the online word association game directly to a database, the meme map automatically evolved through some 1278 iterative evolutions. The resulting meme map can be seen in Figure 4.
 

Figure 3: Data capture with an online word association game

Figure 4: Unpacking the genes of meaning of ‘Healthy Living’

The ‘core’ central concept (Healthy Living) lies at the centre of the meme map and is linked to a hierarchy of associative chains that progressively unpacks the meaning of the concept into its component memes. In this way, each node unpacks into a ranked list of its dominant defining memes (most commonly made associations). Additionally, each meme listed is followed by a polarity rating in brackets, which is simply the average rating respondents gave that association in terms of the degree to which it evoked positive or negative feelings (+3 to -3). Conceptually, the meme map can be thought of as a blueprint of the semantic DNA that progressively unpacks the dominant meaning of ‘healthy living’ in the mindset of participating consumers. For example, the meme map shows that the dominant meme in ‘Healthy Living’ is ‘natural’ whose own genes of meaning can be unpacked, in the context of ‘Healthy Living’, into ‘fresh’, ‘pure’ and ‘organic’. Overall, ‘Healthy Living’, was found to be meaningfully positioned by the memes of ‘natural’, ‘balanced diet’, ‘being well’, ‘keeping fit’ and ‘eating well’; concepts that the meme map then unpacks into their own defining memes.

The reliability of this meme sequencing, that is, the degree to which it produces consistent results, was investigated by repeating the exercise with 120 new respondents. In this way, a second meme map was generated that could be compared to the first (Figure 5). A comparison of the two maps shows a good degree of consistency. Although the specific words selected to describe the meanings differed, the memes emerging were thematically very similar, with ‘good diet’, ‘health foods’, ‘good for you’ ‘active life’ and ‘feeling good’, selected as the most dominant. However, it should be noted that the hierarchical structure between specific nodes in the two maps differed somewhat, implying that the maps should be interpreted as providing qualitative picture of meaning, rather than a quantitative ranking of meaning.

Figure 5: A replication of the ‘Healthy Living’ meme map with different consumers

The validity of this meme sequencing exercise of ‘Healthy Living’, that is, the degree to which the meme map actually describes what the concept means to those researched, was assessed by asking participants in the second study, having made their associations, whether they thought the meme map produced by the first study captured the important associations around ‘Healthy Living’. Of the 76 participants who replied, 59 (78%) replied ‘yes’, indicating that for the large majority of participants the collective view represented by the meme map was seen as providing a valid meaning of ‘Healthy Living’.

Implications: Memetic Marketing and Memetically Modified Brands
Memetic analysis using meme maps allows marketers to identify and unpack how brands are positioned in the minds of consumers. Using this approach to reveal the dominant positive and negative memes that coalesce into overall brand meaning, meme maps identify the adaptive and maladaptive ‘genes of meaning’ coding for a brand’s positioning. With this knowledge, marketers have the possibility of ‘memetically modifying’ their brands in order to engineer a better positive fit with the consumer mindset into which they are positioned: By imbibing trademarks with true, unique and compelling values, brand value can be enhanced. Equally, memetic analysis could be used to identify brand-stretching opportunities by mapping not only dominant brand memes but also latent ‘recessive’ memes lying out in second-order or third-order associations. Meme mapping could also identify value-gaps in the market, that is, to identify values rewarded by consumers but not yet ‘owned’ by brands of some competitive set, and thereby usefully contribute to a competitive positioning strategy. However, perhaps the most exciting role for memetic analysis is the provision through meme maps of a rich and insightful creative stimulus for customer-focused New Product Development: By unpacking the semantic DNA of current successful brands, their memes could be mutated and recombined to form the essence of innovative next-generation power brands.

Dr Paul Marsden is a research psychologist at the London School of Economics

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[i] Various definitions of the meme neologism have been proposed, but most share the idea that memes are units of information in memory that are transmitted culturally as received ideas or behaviours. The understanding adopted here, that of memes as genes of meaning, is consistent with this. For a discussion of meme definitions, see Gatherer (1998) and associated commentaries.