Dimitar Trendafilov
Meme, Brand and Pop-Culture
Summary:
Being a social animal human demonstrates unusual aptitude to imitation which is peculiar to his/her ‘natural’ roots but rather, in a large extend, it is a result of the ‘cultural’ submersion. For that reason the following text makes brief review of the R. Dawkins’ theory of memes in order to apply it later to the contemporary market context and especially in terms of brands. Several examples are given concerning prominent brands as Apple, Doc Martens and some others since they build the argumentation in favor of the thesis that, in principal, brands are among the strongest memes we could encounter in culture and nowadays they take advantage of the highly intensive global communication flow via Internet. Given ideas, behavior and practices of consumption are greatly transferable at least between the limits of certain subculture networks if only there is available powerful enough mechanism to put the meme in motion.
