Wojak’s Hierarchy of Memes
Memes. For many of us, they’re a staple in our internet diet. On the surface, their recipe is quite simple – a relevant image, some text, and boom, you’ve got a tasty meme ready to be served. Bon apple teeth!
However, if we dive a bit deeper, memes can have a large, and healthy, impact on the development and growth of a business. Let’s begin.
The importance of memes can be demonstrated with what I like to call (for now) Wojak’s Hierarchy of Memes. Similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Wojak’s Hierarchy of Memes is a nifty framework for visualizing a hierarchical set of ideas required to achieve an outcome. In our particular case, these needs are focused on building an online community.
Wojak’s Hierarchy of Memes has four levels, starting from the bottom and moving upward: Memes, Community, Culture, and Commerce.
At the bottom of the hierarchy, the foundation, we have memes. Before we move forward, it’s important to identify what a meme actually is. The term meme, while not necessarily originating in his work, was popularized by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene to describe the transmission of ideas, behaviors, styles, etc. across peoples and cultures.
In today’s digital world, memes are the pieces of content, references, jokes, conversational subject matter, relatable posts, etc. etc. that we ingest, and often identify with, in our day-to-day cultural sauntering. They are consumed regularly, help build and reinforce social connections, and to a certain degree, provide a framework for our worldviews.
Simply put, memes are to culture what atoms are to matter; memes serve as ideological building blocks for our respective cultural superstructures.
Moving up one level from memes, we have Community. If you’re a creator of any kind, your community can be understood as the people who regularly consume whatever it is you’re producing. Think of yourself as a performer, with your community being the audience of people who regularly show up to watch your shows.
One step up from Community, we have Culture. Culture can be understood as the aggregate properties of a community over time. Culture is in some sense a measure of values, preferences, and principles that a community puts on display. Think of culture as the collective archetype that represent the emergent character that is your community.
Finally, at the top of the hierarchy, we have Commerce. Commerce is the stuff you sell back to the community. Depending on the cultural values of your community, this could be anything from information, to merchandise, to educational courses, to a simple exchange of services. The reason commerce sits at the top is because before you can sell your community anything, you have to understand their cultural values. And before you can understand their cultural values, you have to understand the things that bind people together to form a community in the first place.
It’s important to remember that products being sold back to the community should not function as a quick cash grab. Products should serve as fertilizer to grow a community and enrich the garden of culture. If you’re only concerned with making a quick buck, you’re community will erode, along with their trust in you as a person. Good luck getting that back.
For best results, products should add legitimate value, be clear in their purpose, and authentically marketed.
Creating an online business from nothing can seem daunting, and it is. But if you start with the correct foundation, growth is inevitable, and gets easier with every brick laid. Creating the right content will give rise to a community of supporters, who eventually create their own culture around your brand. This is the path to financial success and longevity.
Above all else, remember this: everyone wants to sell more stuff, but in order to do so, it’s critical you develop a community of people to sell stuff to, and create products centered around their cultural values.
And above all else, keep meme-ing.