Cat meme marketing that goes viral: Struggles and resistance of small and medium-sized enterprises

Cat memes are still an effective way for small and medium-sized enterprises to attract traffic, but they need to innovate and avoid templates, and create unique content in combination with product features. Read the article to learn more.

After entering 2024, small and medium-sized enterprises that registered official accounts on social media platforms seemed to have replaced their operators with post-00s overnight, and began "crazy" marketing under topics such as "cat meme", "large-scale documentary", and "the company's official account finally fell into my hands".

The so-called cat meme marketing is that the corporate operation team captures popular Internet memes and conducts marketing based on existing materials such as cat meme emoticons and five-star critic MacArthur, combining corporate culture and products.

Opening the video's comments, one can see lines like "The Adventures of Blue V" and "Another Crazy Official" passing over the kitten's head or the face of five-star critic MacArthur.

After watching the fun, calm down and think about it. The fact that small and medium-sized enterprises have launched "crazy" marketing one after another reflects the struggle and resistance of 80% of small and medium-sized enterprises trying to break through the 20% market share under the 80/20 rule.

1. Can small and medium-sized enterprises make a comeback with the help of cat memes?

When it comes to potato chips, the first thing that comes to mind is Lay's. Some diehard fans of other brands may think of Shanghaojia and Kebike. According to data released by Euromonitor International, China's potato chip market is highly concentrated and dominated by foreign capital. In 2022, CR5 (market share of the top five companies in terms of business scale) is as high as 76.7%, and Lay's market share alone has reached 50.8%. In terms of online channel marketing and offline supermarket distribution, 20% of the giants have taken up most of the market share with their cash power and channel advantages.

Founded in 1996, LumiLa Potato Chips is a homegrown domestic potato chip brand. Under the pressure of potato chip giants, it has long been confined to Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan. Its brand awareness and market share have always been at the bottom of the "others" column in the "bar chart". After releasing its first B station video in January this year, the operation of LumiLa's official account was like eating the undercooked Yunnan specialty Jianshouqing, starting a "crazy" marketing.

On April 16, the official account of LumiLa Potato Chips released a video titled "【Cat meme】My friends from other provinces asked me if it was a fake brand and how come I had never seen it before. I was really crying!!!" Although the video was only 44 seconds long, it achieved 1.822 million views and ranked 52nd on the website rankings. After the video went viral, the official account directly announced in the comment area at the top of the video that it would give away a box of potato chips to ten fans. For an account with less than 20,000 fans at the time, the number of comments exceeded 10,000.

The content of this video, which is less than one minute long, is extremely simple and only answers one question: Why has the brand stayed in Yunnan for more than 20 years and not been distributed in offline channels across the country? Because the competition pressure in offline channels is too great and it really cannot compete with international brands. The meme of a cat with big eyes staring at Carslan, combined with the background board of the "national green factory" and the real shot of the clean and tidy production line, made the audience who usually skips every advertisement accidentally watch the entire advertisement.

Cat meme, five-star critic MacArthur, reincarnation novel style, "Love Potato Apartment"... You can say that whatever is popular, LumiLa will do it. Despite the decline in traffic support after the Blue V enterprise certification, as of press time, the account has gained 324,400 followers on the Bilibili platform in half a year, with 54 videos having a cumulative playback volume of 19.826 million and 3.461 million likes, and twice ranked in the top 100 of the entire site rankings.

Similarly, Weilong Biscuits, which was founded in 1993, was once "Internet bankrupt". Although it opened a Douyin account as early as 2019, the early operation results were not significant and the update frequency was relatively slow. It was not until July 2023 that the update speed of Weilong Biscuits exploded. While constantly making crazy things happen, it even pulled the introverted i-person boss to do live broadcasts and shoot videos. As of the end of May, the number of fans of Weilong's official Douyin account exceeded 1 million, with a total of 515 videos updated and 4.03 million likes.

Second, it’s not that advertising is unaffordable, but cat memes are more cost-effective

Why cat meme is so popular among small and medium-sized enterprises? The most critical factor is the price-performance ratio. According to the current advertising market, the advertising quotation for top influencers with more than 3 million fans on the Douyin platform starts at 300,000 yuan. The next best option is to cooperate with mid-level influencers with more than 300,000 fans, and the advertising quotation also starts at 30,000 yuan. If there is no budget for online advertising and no channels for offline distribution, then use cat meme to try to attract traffic. Compared with advertising and influencer cooperation, the video production process of cat meme is simple. With story scripts, emoticons and background materials, the creation can be completed, which is more friendly to small and medium-sized enterprises without professional marketing teams.

In addition, interesting and cute things are always more likely to hit the audience. Compared with the blunt opening advertisements and the placement of advertisements in online celebrity videos, using cats' cute and magical expressions and actions to tell their own stories (advertisements) is more likely to be accepted by the target group.

Data from the "2023-2028 China Potato Chip Market In-depth Investigation and Research Report" released by China Research and Development Institute shows that the age distribution of potato chip consumers in my country is mainly concentrated in the young group of Generation Z aged 24 and below, which highly overlaps with the age distribution of the audience of cat meme.

The popularity of cat memes comes from the fact that creators use cats to tell their own stories. Different cat memes represent their different emotional states. The funny and cute cat images visualize the ups and downs of their stories in a playful way, and eventually become a cultural symbol with a strong sense of contrast, reflecting the attitude of young people towards life, work, study and love.

Riding on the popularity of cat memes, small and medium-sized enterprises have visualized their own images, using crying kittens to represent themselves competing for the market among giants, and using dancing kittens to describe their joy after being noticed by consumers. The official account operation team has also re-positioned itself, using a rebellious marketing approach, using cat memes to describe how they fight against the "antique thinking" of their bosses born in the 1970s, keeping silent about their own products, and focusing on drawing a few boxes of snacks for fans, which seems to have resonated with young people who have just entered the workplace.

The seemingly conscientious operation of the post-00s and the harmless cat meme, in fact, the advertisement is hidden behind the kittens as a background.

The cute appearance of the cat meme package, combined with the natural virality of the package itself, not only improves the favorability of the target population, but also softens the tension of struggle and opposition between the advertisement and the audience.

3. Behind the traffic shortcut: the confrontation between change and template

As more and more companies go out of business, is the cat meme still useful?

The first batch of small and medium-sized enterprise accounts that took the plunge have already gained considerable followers and exposure through the cat meme, while others who followed suit are facing accusations of "lack of creativity" and "bad work".

After all, people only remember that the first person to step on the moon was Armstrong, so who was the second person to step on the moon? If you don't look up the information specifically, most people may not remember that his name is Aldrin.

When consumers open social media platforms, they are bombarded with the same kittens, performing the same plots, and following the same frameworks. The low-quality commercial content will inevitably arouse their disgust and deviate from the original intention of the cat meme "the cat is permanent, but the plot changes."

It is undeniable that a series of cultural symbols unique to young people, represented by cat memes, can help companies establish a "young" image and conduct marketing in a language that the target group likes, so that each official account can quickly increase the number of fans in the early stages of creation. As a shortcut to traffic, it is very easy to create popular videos with millions of views.

However, when the cat meme IP enters the end of its life cycle as a corporate marketing material, how to prevent the motivation for change from becoming a templated implementation becomes a problem that small and medium-sized enterprises need to consider.

After reaping the benefits of the first batch of cat memes, Genji Foods took advantage of its own characteristics as a bean product snack manufacturer and combined the cat meme with its flagship product "Genji Spicy Slices". It produced novel and abstract live videos such as using spicy strips to make soy milk for the boss and using spicy strips to make tofu pudding for the boss. The video playback volume has been maintained at more than 300,000, and it has successfully achieved the effect of attracting traffic. In the product review section of its official Taobao flagship store, there appeared a question: "Is this good for making soy milk?"

Are cat memes no longer usable? The answer is no. After all, no one wants to offend cats.

Author: yihao chen

Source public account: Morketing (ID: 1083455)