Memes, Fitness, and Building Viral Marketing

When most people hear “meme,” they picture a joke caption or a GIF trending on social media. But as I see it, that’s scratching just the surface.

Memes are not just digital amusements. They are the essential building blocks of culture and communication itself, shaping how ideas, behaviours, and even markets evolve over time.

By treating memes as dynamic units of cultural information, we cut through the noise of fleeting trends to work with the very mechanisms that drive influence and distribution.

Reframing memes: the DNA of collective meaning

It’s easy to fall into the marketing trap of “riding the meme wave” with the latest social trend. Instead, I encourage seeing memes the way Richard Dawkins originally defined them: as cultural genes, capable of propagating, mutating, and embedding themselves within entire societies.

Think of a meme as an idea or concept that we recognise as a unit, and how two separate concepts can merge into something new. 

Let’s take an every day example: the concept of a “birthday cake” is a meme. Its genealogy can be traced back to ancient ritual celebrations, but today, it so reliably signals “celebration” that the absence of cake feels odd.

The “Just Do It” phrase created for Nike in the late 1980s has evolved from an ad slogan into a perennial motivator, inspiring individual action far beyond any single campaign. Both are memes with deep roots and remarkable adaptive fitness.

Memes as self-propagating entities

Memes don’t simply spread because they’re funny or new. Their success depends on “fitness”: a blend of resonance, adaptability, and relevance to their cultural and network environment. 

Picture a single phrase “Just Do It” born decades ago, now so entrenched that it inspires actions across generations and platforms. This is a meme whose fitness has been engineered and maintained, not left to chance.

Just Do It - Original 1988 Campaign

Fitness is fluid. For example, the habit of toasting drinks evolved from ancient rituals, survived by adapting to changing contexts, and remains an instantly recognisable gesture. Meanwhile, many brand taglines disappear because they fail to adapt or resonate beyond their initial splash.

The environment can have very literal constraints too. A landscape video might fly on YouTube, but won’t fit the portrait story format of Instagram stories or TikTok. All too often I’ve seen campaigns with a fantastic video that simply won’t crop down to portrait, or vice versa. Make your content adaptable for different channels if you want your message to flow through more channels!

By understanding memes as living informational entities that interact with their environment, we’re able to anticipate, influence, and optimise their propagation.

Memes as campaign architecture

It’s possible - difficult, but possible - to identify and work with memes at a systems level. This isn’t easy, but the pursuit is how we progress.

Here’s a process for operationalising MemeOps:

1. Map the Genealogy

2. Assess Fitness

3. Engineer Propagation

4. Compound Results

Let’s explain. First, trace which memes — stories, symbols, phrases, rituals — already have deep roots and traction in relevant communities.

Then analyse their current fitness. Do they still resonate? Can they adapt to new environments or messages? For instance, when a simple symbol or phrase (like the hashtag #LikeAGirl or the “Ice Bucket Challenge”) aligns with current motivations and is easy to remix, it can scale exponentially.

Rather than blanketing every channel with new content, seed your chosen memes within the most energetic networks and design them for natural variation - much as a successful gene breeds more successful variations.

Instead of aiming for a brief viral hit, your goal is campaigns that embed and entrench, growing in effectiveness as memes are recognised, remixed, and recontextualised over time.

For example, in a recent project, we identified an under-leveraged meme around a community ritual. By designing digital experiences that emphasised this already quietly viral behaviour, we saw not only higher organic participation, but also a 30% lower customer acquisition cost compared to standard paid outreach. The meme didn’t just “go viral,” it became part of the culture of the audience.

Why this approach works

This isn’t simply theory. Campaigns built on meme fitness and propagation dynamics routinely achieve higher organic reach, more meaningful engagement, and longer-term relevance. Instead of fighting for scraps of attention with each new trend, we leverage the deep currents —archetypes and behaviours that repeat across generations and geographies.

For marketers, this means moving from chasing superficial novelty to engineering scalable, adaptive influence. You’re not just riding the waves; you’re mapping the tides themselves.

Shift your perspective on memes today

It’s time to stop thinking of memes as jokes or fleeting social content. They’re not limited to disposable comedy fodder. Memes are a fundamental matter of cultural influence. Every brand, message, and movement that succeeds does so by tapping into these living entities, consciously or not.

A key area of our research at Times One Hundred is developing the means to do this deliberately: identifying, designing, and propagating the memes that fit - and therefore scale - within a market.

If you’re ready to become a meme architect instead of a meme follower, and to build influence that compounds and endures, let’s talk. The biggest opportunities are almost always found beneath the surface.