Meme Marketing: How Brands Use AI Memes to Grow

What is meme marketing?

A meme is a format people recognize and remix: a setup and a punchline, usually over an image. Meme marketing is when a brand makes its own memes about its audience's life and posts them where that audience already scrolls, such as TikTok, Instagram, X, Threads and, for some B2B brands, LinkedIn.

Brand memes come in two kinds:

• Trend memes borrow a format that's going around this week. They can travel far, but they expire fast and you have to move quickly.
• Pain-point memes joke about a frustration your customers have every week. They don't expire, and they're the kind most small brands can make well.

This guide focuses on the second kind.

Why memes work for small brands and apps

• They get sent. A meme is quick to read and easy to send to a friend with "this is you." Each send puts your account in front of someone new.
• They show you get it. A good meme names a feeling your customer hasn't said out loud. That's the feeling you want tied to your brand.
• They're cheap. One image and two lines. You can make a week of memes in the time one video takes.
• They don't need a face. Nobody has to go on camera.

The honest limit is that memes rarely explain what your product does. They build familiarity, so the posts that do explain it land with people who already know your name. Pair memes with formats that show the product, like demos and TikTok slideshows.

Meme marketing examples from real brands

Big brands get the coverage, but the lessons scale down.

Duolingo: tie the joke to the product

Duolingo's owl, Duo, has a large following of its own. In February 2025 the company announced that Duo had died and set users a goal: earn XP in lessons to bring him back. Duo returned later that month, and Duolingo told NPR the campaign was about reminding fans to do their lessons. The lesson for an app: the joke led straight back to using the product.

Ryanair: joke about yourself first

Ryanair's TikTok satirizes passengers, rival airlines and its own service, using whatever sounds and formats are trending. Its head of social at the time told Travel Weekly in 2022 that the account took off after it dropped the corporate tone of voice. The lesson: self-deprecation buys you room to joke. A budget airline that admits it's no-frills is funnier than one that pretends otherwise.

Wendy's: a small team trusted to move fast

Wendy's built its reputation on Twitter, now X, with sharp replies starting in 2017, then turned roasting into an annual event, National Roast Day, which it brought to TikTok in 2023. The same article cites Fast Company's report that a core team of five social staffers can make quick decisions on their own. The lesson: memes need speed, and speed needs a team that doesn't wait a week for approval.

Gucci: hire people who speak the language

In 2017 Gucci promoted a watch line with #TFWGucci, a set of memes made with outside artists. It drew wide attention and some raised eyebrows about a luxury house borrowing internet culture. The lesson: you can work with people who already make memes, and you should expect some pushback when a brand steps into a space that isn't its own.

Finding meme angles in your customers' pain points

The best meme material is a frustration your customers have every week and rarely talk about. Here's how to find it.

1. List the frustrations. Read your own site, reviews of competing products, support emails and Reddit threads. Write down every complaint in the customer's own words.
2. Find the moment. A frustration is a topic. A meme needs the moment it hits: Sunday night, minute four of a run, 2pm with a blank doc.
3. Pick a setup people know. POV, expectation vs. reality, last week vs. this week, textbook me vs. real-life me.
4. Make the punchline the customer's reaction, not your product. The product can live in the caption.

These are memes Feedrick made for sample apps we set up to show the range:

None of them name the app. Each one makes the viewer think "that's me," and the caption or the next post does the selling.

Making memes with AI (without the cringe)

An AI meme generator can make a meme in seconds, but speed isn't the hard part. The joke is. A few rules keep AI memes from feeling like ads in costume:

• Start from the customer, not the product. Give the tool real pain points in the customer's words. Generic input makes generic jokes.
• Use original images. Generate a fresh picture for the scene instead of reusing a famous template photo.
• One joke per meme. If it needs a second line to explain it, cut it.
• Review every one. AI misses tone. Read each meme as your most skeptical customer would.

Feedrick is an AI social media agent, and its meme format works this way: one picture and a punchline, written from what it learned on your website about who you serve and what they're tired of. Each meme costs 1 credit. You keep or skip it, every choice teaches the next batch, and kept memes are scheduled and posted for you. The memes in the table above came from that process. See all five formats or how it works.

On labels: TikTok's Community Guidelines require a label on AI-generated content that shows realistic scenes or people, which can include a photorealistic meme image. Meta's AI labeling rules don't require a label on images, though Meta may add one if its systems detect AI. Both are as of October 2026. Feedrick marks every TikTok post it publishes, memes included, as AI-generated and as promoting your own brand.

Copyright, brand safety and timing

Meme templates belong to someone

Many famous meme images are photos with an owner. When a congressman's campaign used the "Success Kid" photo in a fundraising post in 2020, the boy's mother sent a cease-and-desist letter, and the post came down. The company behind Grumpy Cat won a $710,001 jury verdict in 2018 against a beverage maker that went beyond its license. Using someone's photo to sell something is riskier than sharing a joke. This isn't legal advice, but the safe default is simple: use images you made or have the rights to.

Platforms reward original memes

In April 2026 Instagram stopped recommending accounts that mostly repost other people's photos and carousels. Using a meme template is still fine if you add something of your own, such as unique text or creative edits. TikTok's For You feed standards also exclude reposted content without new creative edits. For a brand, reposting other accounts' memes is a dead end.

Brand safety and timing

• Skip tragedies, politics and anything you'd have to apologize for. The test: would you be happy to see it screenshotted next to your logo?
• Aim the joke at the situation or at yourself, not at your customers.
• Don't join a trend you don't understand. Look up where it came from first.
• Trend memes go stale fast, so post them quickly or skip them. Pain-point memes work any week.

How often to post memes and how to measure them

Memes are your cheapest format, so they're where volume comes from. Three to seven memes a week, alongside videos and carousels, is a reasonable rhythm for a small brand. On Feedrick that's roughly 13 to 30 credits a month, well inside Starter's 100.

Judge memes on what they're for:

Don't expect a meme to drive installs on its own. Track installs from each platform with campaign links, as in our app marketing playbook, and look at how memes move the whole account over a month.

Questions