Author's Note: This article was originally published in Australia's Marketing magazine (November 1997), pp. 18–24. It foreshadowed the millennial interest in 'viral marketing' by Seth Godin and others, but did not lead to lucrative multi-million dollar consultancy gigs for the author. Yet.

If you've ever had an advertising jingle stick in your mind, uttered a catchphrase, or followed a fashion trend, you've encountered a meme. Coined by zoologist Richard Dawkins in his controversial book The Selfish Gene (1976) and independently identified by Fermilab engineering physicist Aaron Lynch two years later, memes (analogous to genes) are cultural units of information that self replicate, using the human mind as a host.

Disseminated during the 1980s in the artificial intelligence and cognitive/communications science fields (notably by Godel, Escher, Bach (1980) author Douglas R. Hofstadter, and cognitive scientists Daniel C. Dennett and William H. Calvin) the new 'science' of memetics, its supporters claim, has evolved beyond its pop culture beginnings. It offers explanations for the virus-like spread of urban folklore, those annoying chain letters and successful product positioning campaigns; raising startling implications not just for the future of marketing, but for marketers themselves.

Hard-wiring The Social Mind

According to Dr Don Beck (of the Texas-based National Values Center), "memes are hidden patterns within the flux and ferment of our culture(s). These are not Calvinistic scripts that lock us into choices against our will. Nor are they inevitable steps on a pre-determinate staircase, or magically appearing crop circles in our collective psyche. Rather, they are common thought structures that form in response to the life conditions in our specific worlds. These human patterns, much like fractals in chaos theory, have formed over the eons of time, having left in their tracks, artifacts, garbage and fossils at different time levels in a vast stratified cultural dig. We think in different systems at different times for different reasons."

Memetically engineering culture and religious designer viruses (for example, the Church of Virus) became popular fringe cyber-culture topics during the early 1990s, but it was the publication of Richard Brodie's Virus of the Mind (1996) that signaled growing mainstream interest in the science. Ex-personal technical chairperson to Microsoft's Bill Gates (and the original author of Microsoft Word), Brodie wrote the book "to explain to a wider audience how memetic engineering techniques operate." Aaron Lynch's Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society ("actually written well before my book, but delayed because of academic publishing procedures," reveals Brodie) followed months later.

Slaves To Advertising

Memetic theory explains how prevailing sociopolitical climates (including millennial madness-bred hysteria and conspiracy theories) and cultural semiotics are harnessed by savvy marketers to target qualified niches and position brands. Neil Stephenson's Cyberpunk satire Snowcrash (1995) "satirizes many marketing trends prevalent in contemporary American society, depicting a hyper-real future where the battleground for the mind is waged between global franchise chains," Brodie says.

"Marketers can now unleash full-blown designer mind viruses through their advertising. The resulting scenario is both frightening and unpredictable: people can literally be enslaved to advertising campaigns. No conscious intent is necessary. Information vectors like tabloid media, cable television and the Internet are perfect vehicles for propagation upon unsuspecting populations."

Suggest to Brodie that he is overestimating the power of marketing - that he's swallowing the industry's own hype about the 'subliminal' effect of advertising - and he will disagree.

"Critics contend that effective subliminal advertising doesn't exist," he says, (the concept was first coined in Vance Packard's 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders), "but this viewpoint is ridiculous. Subliminal messages that push evolutionary hard-wired 'hot buttons' such as deep seated desires for power, dominance, and security are prevalent. Coca Cola's marketing campaigns emphasize the lifestyle that goes with its product. The shift is towards mood and image building, rather than truthful statements about a product's competitive advantages; this means that product content diverges from advertising content.

"One of the most common programming techniques is the 'Trojan Horse' meme, which bundles less attractive memes with more attractive ones. Using repetition to implant memes into your mind until they become familiar and part of your programming, and cognitive dissonance (creating paradoxical/mentally uncomfortable situations that lead to reprogramming that relieves stress) are two other widely used techniques."

"Successfully programming your mind to believe that you prefer certain brands, advertising agencies are among the most brazen and calculating of the mind virus instigators," believes Brodie. "What kind of soft drink do you buy? The ones that sell the most cost twice as much as the unadvertised store brands. The extra money goes into television advertising, sending out the spores of ever more penetrating mind viruses that literally take control of your mind and make you push your shopping cart over to their shelf."

Battle For The Mind

Similar perspectives have been part of 'positioning' marketing models. First formulated by Al Ries and Jack Trout in their landmark article 'The Positioning Era' for The Advertising Age (April/May 1972), positioning seeks to overcome the problems of an over-communicated society by recognizing that the reality that counts is the one that already exists in the prospect's mind: "The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different. But to manipulate what's already there in the mind. To retie the connections that already exist."

Savvy advertisers recognize that the electronic medium itself acts as a filter for messages, and that the easiest defense for most people in an over-communicated society is to oversimplify the messages, leading to oversimplified minds. In their landmark book Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind (1981), Ries and Trout believe that "the average mind is already a dripping sponge that can only soak up more information at the expense of what's already there. Yet we continue to pour more information into that super-saturated sponge and are disappointed when our messages fail to get through."