Meme invasion!! Good or bad? who gets to say

There is a saying about product and marketing: “Good wine needs no bush.” It means that a quality product can attract attention even without heavy promotion, highlighting the importance of quality. However, in today’s digital marketing, information spreads quickly online due to the Internet’s reach (Tsai & Hsiao, 2025). Therefore, regardless of a product’s quality, it must first be recognized, and then we can focus on memes, a fast and widespread marketing method.

Niu lai

The movie 《Niulai》proved the terrifying spread of meme. Chinese cinemas in the summer vacation of 2026, although there are several popular domestic and foreign movies such as The Odyssey and Spider Man, movie fans still flocked to watch a film called Niu Lai, just because of the wide spread picture on social media, a roughly modeled cow shouted “Mom”.

Movie fans and netizens were shocked that such a production level could be appeared in cinema, this picture and clip then spread wildly through secondary created memes, so that many people feel curious and try to watch with the mentality of “seeing how bad it is made”. Subsequently, this 86-minute animated film produced ndependently by a mother and son for 5 years, exceeded about 8.9 million dollars in two weeks (Lang, 2026). While the box office was only about 1,140 dollars in the ten days before its wild spread. (Koh, 2026), becoming an alternative miracle in the history of Chinese cinema.

What is meme

The meme is defined as “something that spread among people.” (Malodia et al, 2022). Video marketing, as an advertising strategy, it is already relatively effective than traditional marketing, but consumers still avoid advertisements by skipping or swiping the screen (McDonald, 2018). According to the research, millennials can be influenced by user-generated content such as memes, while Gen Z can spend a lot of time on social media daily receiving information through memes (Sagin, 2020, Halo Tech Media, 2025). Meme have traits of “entertainment”, “wide dissemination” and “replication”, covering various forms such as animations, GIFs, and pictures, to convey information and emotions with humour and emotion (Razzaq et al, 2024, Tsai & Hsiao, 2025).

Memes for marketing

The authoritative institution in the field of youth marketing, YPulse found that a large number of users aged 13 to 36 frequently share memes, this is a hot topic for young audiences to interact online (Malodia et al, 2022, Tsai & Hsiao, 2025). E-commerce platforms can utilise memes to attract customers to promote purchases, it has a stronger coverage and engagement rate compared with Facebook and Instagram (Lee et al., 2019, Shen et al., 2024, Tsai & Hsiao, 2025). Brand elements can be integrated to establish more natural communication and interaction with customers in the way of entertainment content, it has became a popular social media marketing and advertising strategy (Razzaq et al, 2024).

Take these classic mems of picture and gif as examples, we may not be able to recognise who these people are, what they are doing or where the clips come from, but we can still get emotions and information from them, based on

They demonstrated interactivity and became a classic moment on the Internet.

Netflix

When Netflix face their audience, they use products to create and share various meme images through incorporates humorous and self-mocking copywriting, to establish connection with target users. Netflix has showed the marketing benefits that brands can actively use memes.

For instance, the TV series of “You”, Netflix uses the thrilling scenes that main character Joe Goldberg’s deep entanglement and struggle with his subconscious. Presenting a self-mocking attitude toward life rather than a terrifying and thrilling story by using humorous copywriting on the social media. Based on the utilization of memes, connecting their brand with the target audience, establishing resonance and reducing distance, just like friends rather than salespeople and customers. This is not a one-way transmission of information to the audience, memes use interaction with them to generate interest for the original TV series.

Final thoughts

In the digital period, we can learn the dissemination and narrative ability of meme that are independent of the content and quality of product. When the meme spread online, it can either achieve the purpose of marketing through control or subvert common sense through amplification. But as saying teaches, the improvement of own quality is still priority, we should identify temporary online popularity brought about by meme marketing or the long-term shaping of brand value, the combination of quality and memes might be the key to true popularity.

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