How I used memes to develop the vision of a company
By: Michele Paludetti
Tags: Workshop Facilitation, Value Proposition, Startup, Brand Positioning, Service Design

Finding the meme

I dedicated the first day to the meme. No, we are not trying to find a funny photo with a smart caption, although we want our meme to be somehow viral.

The word ‘meme’ was coined by Richard Dawkins to indicate a unit of memory (Dawkins, 1976). For the purpose of this process, I refer to the meme as the schema of ideas and associations that a brand is able to generate in the mind of the users. This method has been already used to structure the brand positioning (Marsden, 2020), and my goal here is to use it as a starting point onto which we will be able to deeply understand what is speaking for the company and what is not.

To the workshop members, I described the meme of a company as the positive feedback loop of emotions and ideas that make us want to stay inside the loop. It is a set of emotions that the company is able to constantly generate in the users, almost as an addiction. The experience of the service inside the meme should eventually generate those emotions. If the meme fails and we are not able to generate that loop of positive emotions, the result is an unexpected and unpleasant experience for the user that might be lost as a customer.

Having the meme at the base of our workshop was inspired by the map that we create on the first day of the Design Sprint. The idea is that whenever we don’t know what idea works best, we can always look back at the meme and ask ourselves: “Is this keeping us inside the meme?”

How did we find our meme?

Ask the team: “what problem do we solve?”, “how do we solve it?” Give everybody 3 minutes to write down the answers Everyone reads their own answer, writes down the answers, and highlights the keywords in every sentence. Keywords can be the verbs (to facilitate, to move, etc), subjects, or adverbs (quickly, loudly, etc.). If there is a discussion happening, let the team discuss and ask everybody’s opinion if there is somebody that didn’t speak. (5–10 minutes) Now ask everybody to think of the two most important elements of your service that convey the clearest meaning. Ask them to represent the two concepts as in a loop that goes from one word to the other, and back again to the first one.

Tip to highlight and suggest better keywords: avoid using neutral words and don’t be afraid to use words out of context because they can help us refine our image of the company. This is especially true for verbs: avoid saying “we make”, say “we create”, or “we facilitate”, or “we build piece by piece”.

The meme loop should look something like this (see picture above). This loop represents the core ingredients of a company. This loop is a very intimate component of a company and requires a deep understanding of the core values that drives the company. It is very possible that if you don’t know a company very well, the meme loop might be meaningless. Just to make an example with a famous brand, the meme of a company like Spotify could be something like Immersion → Connection through art. In this example, which by the way could be very wrong because it is a very intimate topic, we could see that Spotify wouldn’t put “music” at the center of its loop, because that would be too specific. They could use values like Immersion because all their user experience is designed to live with the user and surround their lives. Again, this is just my own interpretation of the Spotify brand but I hope I was able to convey my point.

Around the meme

So far we have already defined the core of the meme. But how was this helping us understand our business? The next step was to define what is around the meme loop, and to do so we needed to build the main entrance to the loop: we need to understand how the customers actually enter the loop. To do so, we have to find at least two more keywords:

The entrance point The other intermediate steps needed to reach the loop

In order to find the entrance point, we need to have a deep understanding of our customers. In any case, it is a good idea to use workshop methodologies such as Sprint’s “Ask the experts” to gather all the information you need from all the people in your organization that might have insights about the topic. In our case, we already knew a lot about the customers and we were having the CS and Operations manager participating in the workshop.

Entrance point

The entrance point is the starting condition of the users that make them ready to enter the company’s meme. It defines people that we know will be attracted by our company, but it also defines the kind of people that we want to attract. It has to be a value that we are communicating to everybody interested in us, and it has to be a value that we have to communicate more clearly. In our case, we defined this entry point with the word “Change”. We understood that the core starter of our customers was a need for change or a period of transformation they were already experiencing.

Intermediate steps

At this point what is left to do is finding the intermediate steps between the entry point and the meme loop. In order to find these steps, we followed the same method used to find the entrance point. The only difference was that these intermediate steps represent the core synthesis of our offer as a company. In our case, the concept we decided on was “Interests”. Therefore, in our understanding of the meme, we found that the core aspect of our service was not any specific product or service that we were offering, instead what was bringing people inside the meme was our ability to satisfy everybody’s interests. While discussing what the intermediate steps could be, it was easy for us to find a lot of different steps. It is important though not to turn this process into a customer journey map making, because that is not the point. It took us a while to understand what steps were actually core and what other steps could be condensed into one more simple concept. At the end of the process, our meme was looking something like this:

The meme is here, now what?

This finished schema we were looking at now was the core of our secret recipe and defined a decision-making guideline for our company.

The meme represents the starting point for all ideas. In every new project, the company has to confirm the meme. By doing so, the company will keep consolidating its secret recipe in the minds of its customers.

In Part II of this article I will explain how on the second day of the workshop, I used the newly found meme as the foundation for the definition of the company’s value proposition, using a method that I called “The three reading keys of the Value proposition”.