Meme Marketing and Consumer Behavior in the Digital Age: A Systematic Literature Review Using the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R)  Framework

Digital communication environments have fundamentally changed the way consumers today communicate with brands, facilitating participatory, emotional, and culturally responsive online communication. In this changing scenario, meme marketing has emerged as a powerful digital communication tool by which brands use humor, symbolic elements, social responsiveness, and social relatability to connect with social media users. Although the subject of meme marketing has been increasingly studied in both academic and management contexts, the literature is conceptually disjointed and lacks theoretical consistency, especially when it comes to the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral processes that underlie meme marketing's impact on consumer behavior. For this purpose, a systematic literature review is used to synthesize existing research on meme marketing and consumer behavior in terms of the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework. Searching in accordance with the principles of PRISMA, the relevant studies were retrieved from Scopus, Google Scholar, and ScienceDirect from the available years 2016-2026. Thematic synthesis and conceptual analysis were conducted on 30 studies following a structured screening and eligibility assessment process. The insights reveal that the effectiveness of meme marketing is dominated by stimulus factors such as humor, relatability, familiarity with culture, relevance to trends, and platform adaptability. They engender organismic reactions like emotional involvement, cognitive attention, entertainment satisfaction, authenticity assessment, and interpretive interaction, which in turn impact conduct such as sharing behavior, electronic word-of-mouth, purchase intention, and electronic consumer involvement. The review also points to the context- and culture-specific dynamics of the effectiveness of memes, which include the impact of platform culture, symbolic meaning, audience demographics, and algorithmic visibility in participatory digital spaces. In relation to the S-O-R framework, the review conceptually proposes an extension to contemporary digital communication contexts and interprets meme marketing as a culturally embedded and emotionally mediated form of symbolic brand interaction. This proposed extension is theoretical in nature and requires future empirical validation. In addition, practical implications for marketers, digital strategists, and social media practitioners are explored, especially in relation to authenticity, ethical sensitivity, and adapting communication for different platforms in meme-based branding.