Memes, who doesn't love them?
Doge, Aki and Paw-paw and what they can teach us about going viral.
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Hi friends 👋🏻,
Welcome to another episode On Today’s Episode (sorry we’re not talking about movies, no pun intended:)
Today, we’re going to talk about what companies that go viral can learn from some of meme generating icons in Chinedu Ikedieze and Osita Iheme.
The Rise of the Memes
Over the last couple of days and even months, images and videos like those of popular comedy actors Chinedu “Aki” Ikedieze and Osita “PawPaw” Iheme, Odunlade and even Desmond Elliot memes have taken over our TLs, WhatsApp group chats and private messages. The latest of this fad is now in the form #whogovisitmebayi. Just search for this hashtag and you’ll see a slew of recurring memes that have been remixed from just this video shared across multiple platforms including Facebook and Twitter earning thousands of views, shares and retweets.
This phenomenon is just as funny as it is short-lived. It is almost similar to silicon valley’s idea of startups; grow fast, break things and then worry about growing revenue later.
For media and entertainment, the memes are just an end in itself. They bring fun, happiness and a sense of shared creativity. But for “meme” startups, it has to be something more. It has to be a means to an end.
To Be or Not To Be a Meme
You would think memes were easy to create. I mean it's just an image and some text, yeah? Well… you are wrong! You see, what makes it unique is the context, the creativity that allows it to be understood easily and remixed in different contexts while still retaining its funny elements. That's what a meme is.
The term meme was actually founded by the biologist Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene”. He wrote that:
“We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory,' or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'.”
According to Professor Dawkins, a meme is defined as “…the unit of cultural transmission”. He coined the term to allow people to think of genes beyond the heredity of living organisms that determine traits like hair colour but can be replicated but also things like melodies, catchphrases, fashion etc. What comes to mind when I think of this is something like poems such as twinkle twinkle little star that has permeated most societies all over the world.
A meme is an idea, behaviour, or style that spreads through imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. Memes are meant to spread and evolve. What comes to mind when you think of memes would involve Aki and PawPaw, Odunlade, dogecoin (i don’t own any :)
One popular trend that has been going on on Twitter has been the rally of $DOGE. Doge is a cryptocurrency that trades on exchanges. Just as everyone was only talking about Bitcoin and Ethereum, the unknown crypto supported by investors, artists and even billionaires came into the mix and damn it blew everyone out of the water.
Enter Dogecoin.
Well, unlike the popular cryptocurrencies we know like Bitcoin and Ethereum. In 2021 alone, Doge delivered a 10,000% return. to put this in context, if you had invested $1000 in Tesla, GameStop (ex-meme stock) and Bitcoin, you would get less than a tenth of the returns from Doge.
Doge actually started as a meme coin, a dig at the way people traded cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Unlike its popular counterparts, Doge broke all the rules people knew about crypto on its rise to the moon🚀.
A whitepaper behind purpose: scrap that, Doge has no purpose. Ethereum lets you send crypto to another person for a small fee. Bitcoin is a decentralized payment method. Doge has nothing of this sort, it has no defined problem it’s trying to solve
Wallet concentration: There are now about 100k millionaires through Bitcoin. scrap that, one single wallet/person owns about a third (~28%) of the Doge coins in circulation.
No supply cap: Bitcoin will only have 21 million coins in circulation but Doge with there’s no cap to the supply of coins and thus the coin can inflate infinitely. This is one of the reasons why 💎👐 (read: diamond hands) on the coin….well until Elon just had to be featured on SNL.
Doge right now has people’s attention Dogecoin is more than a meme. It's hundreds of memes. Billionaires, celebrities and athletes can’t get enough of the crypto craze. Even your favourite shark tank investor, Mark Cuban, owns a few Doge as well.
But as I was writing this post, I just discovered that Doge had dropped by more than 30% since Elon’s appearance on SNL, but would you blame him for this? Legally, no. Morally, maybe. But the jury remains that despite capturing people’s attention, Doge has continued to prove what it always was, a meme coin.
For startups gaining virality, you don’t want to be a Dogecoin, you want to be even better.
How to feed off the virality
Just as it has worked in mainstream media, the same application can be adapted to startups as well.
Here is how. To understand how viral startups can ride their wave they have to look at what I call the ”Meme Curve”
p.s: This could be a meme in itself but the chemical engineering degree is coming to life :)
So, firstly, a meme is shared and only a small set of people initially “get it”. After these people share it with their friends, groups and chats, it begins to build momentum as more people are becoming aware of the benefits. As many people remix it, it becomes so ubiquitous that it’s now everywhere on the timeline. Your celebrity is retweeting, your friend in another country is liking and even your mom is sharing it with their group chats. The meme is blown, your product is blown and you’re the most loved person on the internet.
But that’s where you have to be most careful. The high that lasts just as people continue to share and remix the meme.
Onwards from this is the drop-off. People are tired because it’s been overused and their friends are no longer sharing it as they used to.
For your product to be an internet meme, it needs to have an idea that can be replicated via the Internet in the shape of a video(gifs included), text or image. It can be passed on as an exact copy or can change and evolve. The mutation can change by meaning but keeps the structure of the meme or vice versa. It must spread rapidly like a virus at an accelerating speed.
Its goal is to be known well enough to be replicated within a group such as Nigerian Twitter, Family group chats, football group chats etc.
A large number of companies have launched their products faster than they expected just by the sheer virality of their product through memes. A number of these startups are even seeing this as a legitimate use of their marketing budget to get new customers.
An example of this was the Abeg app. What started as a meme to express Nigerian’s gifting nature turned to an app that has gotten 5000 downloads within 5 days of its launch
Normally, businesses pay a lot of money through paid advertising like Google or Facebook ads and many times it affects bottom lines by taking a huge amount of the revenues. Memes are a good alternative to this because they inherently allow for network effects to occur such that, as more and more people share it, it becomes more popular and increasingly liked by others. They may then remix and recreate it, adding more fuel and more fun for everyone in the group.
But there's only so many memes can do. After all the RTs, likes, and thousands of shares, many businesses still do not ride this wave to become successful. For others, they’re overwhelmed by the newfound fame that it breaks them, further highlighting the loopholes that exist in the business.
Packy McCormick in his 2020 essay on The Will Ferrell Effect suggested that startups should avoid fizzling out too fast from virality by doing the following:
Balance Exposure: Consistency in production but selective in appearance, for example, Leonardo Di Caprio’s longevity in Hollywood.
Build In Stickiness: Build network effects or switching costs into the product from the jump that rewards power users and maintains a sense of stratification. This is important for many companies, but particularly those that get an early flood of users due to curiosity instead of a deeply-felt need for the product.
Evolve: Continue to iterate on and improve the product without straying too far from the core value prop. This may generate new memes.
I agree that using memes as an avenue to grow sales, or increase demand to reduce CAC spend can be justified, but using it as an end where the basic business foundations are lacking only takes you from being a fun and cool product to a product that’s lame, brings ridicule and perhaps could lead to failure.
In the golden age of Nigerian movies when movies were dropping almost daily, two particular actors caught our attention. Chinedu “Aki” Ikedieze and Osita “Paw paw” Ihema. These actors were consistent in giving us jaw-dropping comedy. A particular movie that comes to mind is Aki na ukwa. They gave us many funny quotes and memes, and we absolutely loved them. Children loved them, parents loved them (even when most of their actions were mischievous).
Here are a few reasons I believe they won:
Limit exposure: Since Chinedu and Osita had started acting in the ’00s, they were consistent enough in their delivery that people hardly forgot who they were and the nickname “Aki and Pawpaw” resonated with whoever saw a meme featuring them. However, they were selective in the movies they featured in, only appearing in movies that they were the headline actors and could be given freedom.
Create stickiness: Across their acting roles in various movies from “Aki an ukwa”, to “Tom and Jerry” showed their prowess was always distinct in whatever movie they acted in. their onscreen and offscreen chemistry even made it so enticing that fans only just wanted to see them in movies.
Evolve: Their acting has continued to improve and they have gone on to feature in some of the most popular Nigerian TV series. Check out their memes on Zikoko to see their range.
Where Do We Take All The Fun To…?
Chinedu Ikedieze/Osita Iheme are in between the spot of John Okofar (Mr Ibu) and Pete Edochie, who is known for perfection in all his movies while hardly moving away from his known value proposition.
If you’re a startup, you definitely want to be an “Aki and Paw-paw”. You want to succeed and use your viral growth to propel you forward, and by doing this you limit exposure, create stickiness and evolve your core product that people keep coming back for more even after the euphoria has waned.
At the end of the day, Memes are just like wishing stars and frothing champagne bottles that start with a loud cheer, the standing ovation, the brightest sparks but after a few seconds and the euphoria dies down, people move on to other things that can give them that kind of “high”.
By riding the virality wave, your product has to balance its exposure, build in stickiness and evolve so that people keep coming back for more different and unique experiences.
As much as I would love this newsletter to go viral (please share), I need to maintain my fuel by balancing exposure, build more stickiness, and get to work on next week’s piece so I can continue to evolve.
Thanks to Baye for editing!
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Also, if you’re an early-stage startup in Africa in the seed or pre-seed stage that wants to share your story to a wider audience and also bag some extra deals :), I’d love to hear about you and what you’re working on. You can reach out to me on kamsonwani@yahoo.com
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Thanks for reading and see you on the next episode,
Kamso.