Meme and Moment Marketing: A New Guerrilla Strategy of Digital Engagement

Meme and moment marketing have emerged as contemporary digital communication strategies that enable brands to interact with digitally native audiences through culturally relevant and real-time content. While prior studies have examined emotional appeals and contextual relevance separately, limited empirical research integrates humour-induced emotional arousal, event–brand congruence, and brand salience within a unified consumer engagement framework. Addressing this gap, the present study investigates how these factors influence consumer engagement and their subsequent effects on brand awareness and brand attitude within the short life cycles of social media content. Grounded in the theoretical perspectives of emotional contagion, organizational virality, and brand congruence, the study adopts a mixed-method approach combining systematic content analysis of brand-generated meme and moment marketing posts with a cross-sectional survey of digital consumers. Data were analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The findings reveal that humour-driven emotional arousal and event–brand congruence significantly enhance consumer engagement, which in turn positively influences brand awareness and brand attitude. In contrast, brand salience does not demonstrate a significant direct effect. The results highlight the strategic importance of emotional resonance and contextual alignment in strengthening digital consumer–brand relationships.