Former Oxford Professor, Richard Dawkins, is well known for his witty and elegant explanations of how Darwin’s Theory works in genetic detail. It’s all about replicator power!
Fitness survives!
In Dawkin’s acclaimed book on Darwin’s Theory, The Selfish Gene, he showed how fitness survives not only in biology but wherever we can find replicators at work.
As another example he coined the word meme as a unit of culture which gets passed on from person to person. A meme is a replicator like a gene. Successful genes replicate from DNA to DNA and successful memes replicate from brain to brain via word-of-mouth (WOM).
(An internet usage of the word meme has mutated to refer to pics of cats and other catchy but unimportant things to spread around to pass away idle time).
“Memes can be good ideas, good tunes, good poems, as well as drivelling mantras.” says Richard Dawkins in Unweaving the Rainbow. “Anything that spreads by imitation, as genes spread by bodily reproduction or by viral infection, is a meme … As with genes, we can expect the world to become filled with memes that are good at the art of getting themselves copied from brain to brain … It is enough that memes vary in their infectivity for darwinian selection to get going … We may think this spreading for the sake of spreading rather futile, but nature is not interested in our judgements, of futility or anything else. If a piece of code has what it takes, it spreads and that’s that … In Climbing Mount Improbable I explained that an elephant’s DNA and a virus are both ‘Copy Me’ programmes. The difference is that one of them has an almost fantastically large digression: ‘Copy me by building an elephant first’. But both kinds of programmes spread because, in their different ways, they are good at spreading.
The meme is a very useful tool for understanding how WOM in marketing works because it allows us to harness much of the power of Darwin’s Theory. Today, memetics is one of the fastest growing ideas in science. Memetics allows us to understand not only how people get ideas but, more importantly, how ideas acquire people or how minds become memed.
NOTE: Just a note on repetition. As you’ll see, repetition is a very powerful tool when we’re establishing new brain patterns. For example, you’ll notice repetition in this training course and the main point is that it is deliberately put there for your benefit. It’s to help your brain acquire these ideas more easily, or, to put it another way, to help these ideas acquire your brain more easily. The most important memes are the ones that are invested with the most repetition.
Susan Blackmore in her enlightening book The Meme Machine explains, “We do copy each other all the time and we underestimate what is involved because imitation comes so easily to us. When we copy each other, something, however intangible, is passed on. That something is the meme. And taking a meme’s eye view is the foundation of memetics.”
— Click through here to Susan’s delightful TED talk
In marketing, nothing is more important than taking the meme’s eye-view because nothing is more important than WOM.
WOM is the meme that gets itself passed on from one customer to another. Or, a meme is the WOM that allows one customer’s brain to become ‘infected’ by another brain.
Memes reside in the brain (like genes reside in DNA) and how they get from one brain to another is what memetics is all about. Only the fittest memes survive.
Think of the marketplace as the meme pool. There are vastly more memes than there are brains to shelter them.
Which ones will survive? Why? Which ones will fail? Why?
DFQ TD02 Feedback Question:
What is a meme?
Give an example of a meme that has been good at getting inside and surviving in your brain …
Meme is a unit of culture which get passed on from a person to person. It is a replicator like a gene. For example, a good song, good story, and a good idea.
There are two memes in my Brian, observation and thinking tools, like cvs2bvs and start do notice think
A meme is a replicating element of culture passed on from person to person. An example of a meme that has been good at getting inside and surviving in my brain is the idea of changing (improving) my way of thinking.
Meme: A snippet pf information that becomes ingrained in the brain
Alka Selter Plop plop fizz fizz oh what a relief it is… over 50 years old and cannot die!!
A meme is a culture code that is powerful enough to inspire one person who initially holds it to pass it on to other persons. Usually, a meme is equally powerful enough to be recieved by or capture the other person or persons who will in turn pass it on to others.
One meme that successfully got inside and survived in my brain is the Jesus Code.
Meme : the invisible stuff about an idea that survives by copying itself and getting transferred from one brain to another
there are 2 memes hyperactive in my brain 1. cvs to bvs …i find myself thinking the cvs to bvs of other people , everywhere in news , in meeting even in shopping center.
the other meme is my religious meme it has a strong hold on my living and even day to day actions and reflections.
The key to long-lasting memes is copy fidelity. If a meme mutates too fast or too often, it won’t last very long. The Meme meme has successfully made a home in my brain. How much of what we do and know is truly at a conscious level?
Who are you? Why do you believe what you do? If genes create the physical means by which to replicate themselves (e.g., an oak tree is simply an acorn’s way of making more acorns), what do memes create? Maybe computers, smart phones, transmission networks, neural networks? Social networks, cable networks, networks, networks, networks. If you see a network, assume it is solely for meme transmission.
Meme: an idea, concept, or behavior that is spread by peoples interactions.
A meme from my project management experience: Here’s another example of those who don’t do the job (usually management), making decisions on how it should be done.
A meme is a thought, idea, concept, or neural signature that is passed from one brain to another by replication.
A meme that has been good at getting inside and surviving in my brain has been the ‘4 hour work week’, or the idea that our ‘offer’ to the marketplace can be leveraged by the internet, so that we can work less, provide more value, and therefore earn more.
meme = a unit of culture which gets passed on from person to person.
An example of memes that have infected my brain is what is or is not a healthy way to eat
Meme = A way of interpreting the world.