Luxury brands have increasingly embraced internet memes in their social media advertising campaigns. For example, Gucci’s #TFWGucci campaign demonstrated how luxury brands can incorporate memes into their digital communication strategies to capture consumer attention. Memes—digital content that spreads rapidly through sharing, imitation, and adaptation across online communities—have become a popular way for brands to engage consumers. Branded memes, in particular, leverage humor, relatability, and virality to communicate brand messages in a more engaging and shareable format. However, the use of memes by luxury brands may seem somewhat unexpected, given that these brands have traditionally emphasized exclusivity, prestige, and sophistication. Although many companies actively employ meme advertising to connect with consumers, it remains unclear whether this communication strategy enhances consumer responses or weakens a brand’s premium image.

Professor Tae Hyun Baek’s research team in the Department of Media and Communication at Sungkyunkwan University conducted an international collaborative research project with Professor Jooyoung Park from Peking University HSBC Business School in China. Across four experiments, they examined how luxury-branded meme advertising influences consumer responses. The findings were published in the International Journal of Advertising, a leading SSCI journal ranked among the top 1.5% of Communication journals according to the 2024 Journal Citation Reports (JCR).

The results showed that consumers perceived luxury-branded memes as funnier than non-meme advertisements, with perceived unexpectedness mediating this effect (Study 1). Luxury-branded memes also enhanced consumers’ social media sharing intentions. Consumers viewed the combination of luxury brands and memes as unexpected, and the funnier they found the content, the more likely they were to share it with others (Study 2). The same pattern emerged in a field experiment using Facebook A/B testing. Luxury-branded meme ads generated more clicks and user engagement than non-meme ads (Study 3). However, meme advertising was not equally effective for all brands. While meme ads increased consumers’ sharing intentions for luxury brands such as Prada, non-meme ads generated stronger sharing intentions for non-luxury brands such as Zara (Study 4).

According to Professor Baek, “Luxury-branded memes appear to be most effective when consumers perceive the ad content as both unexpected and funny. Our findings suggest that luxury brands should carefully align meme advertising strategies with their brand positioning and communication objectives.”