| Ah, but that is where you are wrong. Facts don't apply to successful memes. You can remember the 'butterfly effect'? Yeah. Some people dined out doing Ted (x) talks on that one. To make a meme 'effect' legitimate, you need the scientific paper, ideally published in Nature. It is then a thing. Let me inspire you: "The Happy Meal Effect" - surely this one writes its own, with that enlightening twist of knowledge you lacked before, backed up by a scientific study, so it must be true? "The Dyson Effect" - just an example of doing this with a brand name. This is all about what happens when a boring product gets made high tech, expensive and desirable. "The Silly Beggar Effect" - those are two words just chosen at random. This could come with its own origin story, maybe in Cincinnati there was an incident in 1893 that (despite time and geography) led Mark Twain to coin the phrase. The pertinent quote is imagined but nobody is going to check. Just by having a silly beggar in town everyone's life improves commensurately. They don't even have any 'broken windows' thanks to the 'Silly Beggar Effect'. If you cared for American politics then you could pay an agency to promote the phrase "The Corn Pop Effect" describing it as a decline in living standards. Then do your political poll and dress it up as a scientific paper proving there is such a thing as the "Corn Pop Effect". In regular parlance any loss can be shrugged off as just "Corn Pop Effect". With enough money you could get that clumsy phrase on the lips of the world by election time, giving the 'effect' true significance. The premise of this study is not new, in the days when cake mixes were an exciting product, the marketing men discovered that it was better to not include dried egg. This necessitated adding an egg to the mixture and this made the endeavour 'baking' rather than 'cheating'. The involvement was a good thing. The 'home made baked' product was the result with the desired buy in, not the 'cheated' product. |