Meme to Brand

Following our Human to Meme SEED, we look at which brands get it - with SSENSE being the perfect example. In early 2023, the e-commerce platform began a subtle shift, blending meme culture with luxury fashion to create the playful, social-first approach we now associate with the brand.

Early posts tentatively waded into the conversations of its audience, each one more refined than the last, until memes, e-commerce shots and fashion-forward campaigns became inseparable parts of its strategy. By observing how customers were using the platform, what they were buying and how they were discussing it, SSENSE traded purely polished brand imagery for content that felt alive, relevant and shareable.

Instagram and TikTok are where culture happens in real time – they are the digital water coolers of our generation – and brands that participate in those conversations can become part of the cultural flow. Even unexpected businesses have found their voice with memes – check out Ryanair’s savage X roasts. But for every success, there are thousands of failures: most brands chase virality without nuance, producing memes that fall flat.

So, we asked SEED CLUB what makes memes move and what makes them matter:

Do memes shape culture or are we letting culture rot into memes?

Memes aren’t an external influencing factor on culture – they’re endemic, a way for culture to express itself, like the technology of language or cave paintings. It’s interesting to see their emergence into relevance alongside the end of linearity as the dominant mode of understanding history. In a way, memes are a formal aspiration for brands – a means for a brand to achieve maximum self-actualisation, where both early adopters and laggards are equal in spreading its prophecy. I don’t know. I don’t know – there’s no science, there’s just slop, and that’s beautiful. Ruba Al-Sweel

Memes act as a coping mechanism for culture – a collective response to what’s happening, giving regular people the power to create cultural icons, even if we forget them quickly. The joy lies in the process, in seeing how far a meme can be taken, not in the meme itself. Their value is in their irreverence and incoherence – in how they push aesthetics beyond their safe corners. That’s where they truly add to culture: by being wrong, weird and exaggerated. Memes stretch the edges of imagination, even if only briefly – and that’s what keeps them alive. Nicolas Cevallos

Memes are like the zombies of culture – constantly reanimated, drifting through new contexts and gathering attention. Their meaning mutates through reinterpretation as they go. I’ve started to call this movement memetic drift. For brands, the challenge is learning to perform in a space where meaning is unstable, and where audiences reshape that meaning with every repost. Working memetically means cultivating sensitivity to this motion because, after all, the movement is the message. Brands that understand this can become choreographers rather than directors – more part of an improv jazz trio than the conductor of a symphonic orchestra. Laura Vent

I think both can be true at the same time. Our culture is somewhat rotting into memes, while at the same time memes can carry a lot of nuance. The best memes can say an awful lot without really needing to say anything, relying on layers of pre-context and cultural understanding. Mike Evans

Memes thrive in a culture that’s endlessly accelerating – rotting and regenerating at the same time. This is also why the format rarely works for brands. Rather than relinquishing control, brands often end up producing content in meme-like costumes. Organic memes self-replicate and survive because people use them to express what hasn’t been said before. While brands chase the organic transmission real memes achieve, it’s often the anti-memetic campaign ideas – the ones that should resist spreading – that end up being shared the most. Anna Rose Kerr

Should brands engage with memes?

When I think about memes, I think about how they move. What brands need to understand is that a meme isn’t a piece of content — it’s a pattern of motion. Years ago, people would ask, “Can you make me a viral?” as if virality were a noun, a thing. But what we’re dealing with here are verbs – actions, ways of moving. Memes show that the real energy of culture lies not in what is made, but in how it travels. Laura Vent

Brands that do memes well know to give creators both money and control – they’re happy to be the joke. I used to enjoy telling friends that their picante, Chin Chin or matcha order wasn’t an independent choice, but influenced by paid sponsorship on their favourite meme accounts. Now, though, people don’t want to believe it’s possible to buy memes, so I just let them drink their Guinness Zero in peace. Anna Rose Kerr

I don’t think brands should engage with memes if they don’t speak the language or if it doesn’t fit their identity. That said, the smartest brands shape how they’re portrayed through memes by designing strategies around the cultural contexts that generate them. Mike Evans

Memes can be understood through their density: some are volatile and conceptual, others dense and heavily referential. Brands should work with both. Build a universe rich in memetic possibilities that invites participation and reinterpretation. Drop breadcrumbs to encourage co-creation, and develop the intuition to spot when organic memetisation occurs around a product or campaign – then respond. When using existing meme formats, a casual wink is fine, but only if it can be made your own. Brands that lean too heavily on preexisting memes often seek quick cultural connection, hoping to appear “in on the joke”. That attention may bring visibility, but it rarely builds lasting relationships. Nicolas Cevallos 

Contributors:

• Ruba Al-Sweel is an artist with a practice rooted in writing and publishing focused on media theory and networked communications. Her films “First Phone” (2024) and “Plastic Pilgrims” (2025) address the ontologies of technology, e-waste and the architecture of accelerated connectivity. 
• Laura Vent is a visual researcher, creative director and founder of Source Material Studio, a consultancy exploring how images shape culture. 
• Nicolas Cevallos is a creative consultant from Ecuador, based in Barcelona. He founded CENTRO, a strategy agency and think tank. 
• Mike Evans is a strategist and creative from Leeds, based in Vienna. Previously, he worked in-house at Red Bull and Dekmantel.
• Anna Rose Kerr is an artist and creative director from New Zealand, based in London. Her work examines the physicality of the internet and invites people to imagine more expansive futures. 

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