Memes & Marketing: What Ozempic Tells Us About Our Culture and Why That’s Important
Ozempic and other weight loss drugs have taken the world by storm as “miracle” weight loss solutions. The craze has disrupted the weight loss industry, a business valued at around $20 billion, pulling focus from commercial interventions like diet programs and gym memberships to medical interventions. With this new competitor, brands in that space have begun to respond. WeightWatchers, a weight-loss program service, is now offering a new membership plan that gives consumers access to clinics where doctors can prescribe semaglutide medications, like Ozempic, in addition to other weight loss-focused benefits. Direct-to-consumer medication and supplement provider Hers is following suit.
Semaglutide, or GLP-1 agonist, drugs are formulated for the treatment of conditions like Type-2 diabetes and obesity. Ozempic’s maker, Novo Nordisk, also manufactures Wegovy, another semaglutide prescribed for chronic weight management. To achieve weight loss, semaglutide drugs suppress a patient’s appetite and slow the rate of digestion.
These drugs also have food and beverage brands, particularly in the snacking and sweets category, already innovating around or at least thinking about the reality of a consumer base with a smaller appetite and changed palettes. Walmart recently reported that semaglutide users are purchasing smaller volumes of food, according to their internal data. Industry powerhouse Nestlé announced a new line of products specifically made for semaglutide users that features deliberate portion sizes and more nutrient-dense products.
Experts are even speculating about the long term effects of mass population weight loss across industries, too. Investment and financial services firm Jefferies estimates that airlines will save on fuel as collective flight weight goes down. Strategically, businesses need to prepare for the impact of these drugs on a significant portion of the population.
And unlike fad diets, experts believe that these drugs have lasting power. Obesity rates in the US and globally have been steadily rising. Recent estimates suggest that 10 percent of men and 14 percent of women globally are obese, doubling estimates from 1980. In the US, rates are significantly higher, with an estimated 42 percent of adults having obesity in most recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The introduction of a widely available semaglutide drug that could safely manage weight across the population could create the extreme changes predicted by experts. However, it’s still too early to say. The increasing popularity of semaglutide drugs will ultimately result in more clinical research about their long-term effects and benefits, but growing awareness of side effects like “Ozempic face” may turn people off to these drugs as an option.
But let’s look deeper, as researchers, into the Ozempic craze. What does it tell us about our culture? What does it say about our relationship with the body and with how people’s bodies change? Why are the answers to questions like these valuable for businesses and their marketing departments to know?
The point of this article is not to suggest that cultural beliefs alone have driven the rise of semaglutide drugs or even the weight loss industry. Obesity is a medical condition that can impact certain aspects of a patient’s quality of life and overall lifespan. These, among others, are significant motivators for wanting to lose weight, through any intervention. However, cultural factors also may be driving adoption.
To understand culture is to understand the “social forces — both subtle and overt — that govern the beliefs and behaviors of everyday life,” as Dr. Marcus Collins, a marketing professor at the University of Michigan puts it in his book For the Culture (2023). At the heart of cultural insights are people’s beliefs, ideologies, and values. These forces influence the way they see the world and the way they live in it — and the way they purchase and consume. So what does Ozempic say about our culture, and how might that impact purchasing decisions and behavior?
In the US, there is an established cultural preference for thinness, especially for women. Thin bodies are seen as more beautiful, more successful, and more desirable. It’s important to note that dominant discourses, while powerful, neglect nuanced perspectives from diverse groups. There are also counter cultural ideologies, like the Body Positivity movement, that have sprung up over time to challenge the dominant one. Culture is not just one discourse, it’s made up of countercultures and subcultures, whose ideologies speak to one another as they are lived out in the world. When it comes to American culture’s point of view on the body, the semaglutide craze adds another loud voice to the cultural conversation.
Culture is also not stagnant. It changes over time. Prior to the twentieth century, fat bodies symbolized wealth and fertility. Ancient Grecians typically portrayed their goddess of love and beauty, Aphrodite, with curves. A round belly meant that you had enough money to a) not need to work and b) feed yourself in excess. Today, fat bodies are associated with personal failure and laziness. Even traditionally fat positive societies have started to shift toward fat negativity. From a cultural perspective, the GLP-1 drug revolution in a way reflects and reinforces the dominant preference for thinness and adds a window into our thoughts and feelings on weight loss.
Ozempic became a viral sensation in 2023 partially driven by several celebrity endorsements — Elon Musk, for one — for this class of drug. Its continued affiliation with celebrities misusing the drug for cosmetic weight loss propelled its sensational popularity. There was even, at one time, a shortage of Ozempic in part due to a number of prescriptions written for patients who did not actually have Type-2 diabetes.
Ozempic’s association with celebrity permits consumers to bring the brand into the conversation around fame and celebrity, a conversation that often becomes moralistic and critical. To understand this, I’ve taken a look at memes related to Ozempic. Commonly dismissed as inconsequential and trite, memes are fast-moving vehicles of cultural expression and commentary. Careful analysis of the right memes provides a window into popular thought about timely topics. With respect to Ozempic, the memes collected below demonstrate a humor that operates on the perception of celebrities as superficial and hypocritical…
Other memes offer a critical stance regarding using Ozempic for weight loss, mocking users for resorting to a drug as an alternative to lifestyle changes. Despite emerging countercultural narratives around size acceptance, these attitudes point to the continued dominant understanding of fatness as personal failure, similar to the “bootstraps myth” of economic status that attributes economic misfortune to a lack of drive, intelligence, discipline, and morality and neglects sociocultural and environmental factors.
The conversation around Ozempic and other semaglutide drugs suggests not only that we value thin bodies but that we have certain expectations around achieving thinness. Ozempics’s position as a medical intervention for weight loss and its association with celebrity offers it up as a talking point in moralistic conversations about how people look and the way that people try to change how they look. Not only do you need to look a certain way, but you also need to get there a certain way. On her talk show, Wendy Williams once spoke with an audience member who had lost significant weight. In response to learning that she had gotten surgery, Wendy exclaimed “All right, you cheated.”
With Ozempic now in the picture, how might it and similar drugs influence the cultural conversation regarding weight loss? If enough people participate, will medical weight-loss interventions become more acceptable, normal even? The commercial ramifications of Ozempic’s rise in popularity will echo throughout a lot of industries, as discussed prior, but noticing how it — and cultural discourse in general — influences consumer viewpoints and experiences can help businesses form deep and meaningful relationships with consumers.
Ultimately, culture influences behavior. It is behavior. To understand a consumer’s culture is to decode their behavior and beliefs. Those kinds of insights can help brands understand the meaningful roles they play or can play in consumers’ lives. The cultural preference for thinness may frame Ozempic and similar drugs as an opportunity to fit in socially. But the cultural preference for weight loss through hard work may evoke feelings of embarrassment around taking it. Knowing this can influence the way you communicate about the drugs (empowering messaging) and the way you design and deliver it (discreet packaging).
Brands that resonate get people to move, as they are more likely to form an emotional connection with consumers. What’s more, in a world where hypersegmentation is all the rage, cultural insights can give marketers a through line to capitalize on in messaging. They provide a way of communicating with consumers that will connect with people across segments on a deep, emotional level. If you want to connect with diverse audiences, you should understand the values and beliefs held by different groups.
Think about the brands in your life that connect with you, and use them as a window into the culture you live in or subcultures you are a part of. Look at the memes around viral conversations — even pop culture tells us something about ourselves through the things we choose to share and make popular. Try to see the deeper narratives that are at play, even if they are obvious. Even if a specific cultural insight isn’t relevant to your brand, being more empathetic and wiser in the ways that people work can only help you in the long run.
