When Brands Try Too Hard: Meme Appropriation, Cringe Perception, and Cultural Misalignment in Social Media Marketing

Abstract

Internet memes have entered the realm of brand communication, but the circumstances under which branded meme use backfires remain understudied. This paper develops and tests a sequential process model in which brand meme appropriation causes cringe generation, which, in turn, triggers cultural meaning system misalignment and undermines the consumer–brand relationship. Meme fluency is proposed as a boundary condition that influences the extent to which consumers are able to detect inappropriate brand meme appropriation and respond to it with cringe. A cross-sectional survey design was used to test the theoretical model. Data were collected from 432 Generation Z social-media users and analyzed with partial least squares structural equation modeling. A measurement and structural model are specified that underlie six research hypotheses, including moderation, specific mediation, and sequential mediation. As the underlying respondent-level dataset was not supplied for this draft, the numerical results presented in the Results section are illustrative and should be substituted with the researcher’s actual SmartPLS output before submission. The proposed findings suggest that meme appropriation can create cringe, that cringe acts as an interpretive warning signal of cultural mismatch, and that cultural misalignment can damage consumer–brand relationships. This study shifts meme-marketing research from the dominant question of how brands can make memes effective to the more consequential question of when brands should not join a cultural conversation. It provides a culturally grounded explanation of meme failure and offers managers a diagnostic principle: access to a meme format does not necessarily legitimize brand participation in the culture that provides the meme meaning.