What Bill And Jill Memes Taught Us About Afrillennials™

In Trends

You must have met Bill and Jill in the past week? The perfect people who don’t engage in the superfluous nuances of life and keep to their best behaviour, as our young society prefers them to be. Recently Bill and Jill memes took social media by storm with Afrillennials™(African millennials) indirectly calling their peers out on the mistakes annoyances they engage in. The stick figures were a cool mechanism for sending a subtle message on what’s cool and what isn’t to other youth. We look at five things your brand can learn about Afrillennials™ in the Jill and Bill revolution.

It’s All About Them

The meme turned from “be like Bill and Jill” to “be like me” when Afrillennials™ started taking it upon themselves to describe what they don’t do, why they don’t do it, why that’s great on their part, and then proceeded to encourage their peers to be like them. This was more effective than Bill or Jill could ever be as self-meming became more relatable. This also allowed the youth to share some more of themselves and score brownie points with their peers.

They’re Risk Averse

Running the gamut from funny to vicious, students are making it quite clear that they are enjoying being risk free and are hiding behind the memes. Instead of calling out their peers when they are being annoying or at fault, they’re engaging as a collective to address issues with peer support. As a bonus they get to enjoy the limelight and highlight their own awesomeness while they’re at it. Only, because the meme promotes vanity, gloating about their best traits wasn’t frowned on this time.

Virality Is Linked To Their Reality

There is a bit of truth in every joke and that promotes the shareability of it. The fact that these hilarious memes were relevant to Afrillennials™ and their peers made them shareworthy and fast lead the meme to go viral. Peer pressure played a further role in spreading the campaign, followed by meme generators being developed to support the campaign and even a “don’t be like Bill” website. These were just some of the platforms created in line with the memes and further contributed to the pathological spread of memes.

Image Matters More Than Ever

Students are self-conscious and work on how they are perceived by their peers all the time. Overall, image can influence their peers’ perception of whether they have made it and students will do anything to ensure they maintain their reputation or enhance it. Bill and Jill helped Afrillennials™ to influence their own images positively, a rare opportunity.

They Still Suffer From FOMO

The fear of missing out(FOMO) is still real and will unlikely subside. Having the chance to learn their peers’ secrets to success or simply cool factors, helped the youth to escape their reality and see how they could potentially improve themselves. Even though it was as simple as “Jill does not post selfies every hour, Jill is smart, be like Jill”.

Take it from Bill and Jill

The memes speak to the youth’s aspirant nature, wanting to achieve great things in their future and lead an idealistic life. This exercise demonstrates that brands can benefit from helping the youth to celebrate their individuality and success. Whether you’re hiring millennials or trying to sell them a product or service, your brand should be helping the youth to be more like Bill and Jill.