There are two kinds of viral moments on the internet.

The first is the one every marketer chases. A clever line. A smart visual. A trend timed perfectly. It explodes for a few days, gets circulated over WhatsApp, every brand jumps on it, everyone claps, and by next Tuesday nobody remembers it existed.

The second kind is much rarer. It doesn’t feel engineered. It doesn’t even feel particularly clever. It just happens because the right person said the most ‘them’ thing.

‘Sonam, it’s done bro.’

On paper, it is almost aggressively unremarkable. Four words. No punchline. No brilliant observation. No linguistic gymnastics. If you saw it on a copy deck without context, you’d probably ask for another route.

And yet, within hours, it had escaped the post it belonged to. It became a meme template. A reaction audio. Instagram captions. WhatsApp forwards. Brand posts. People who hadn’t even seen the original post somehow knew the line. It stopped belonging to Salman Khan and started belonging to the internet.

Our first instinct is to say, ‘Well, that’s just how memes work.’

I don’t think that’s true. I think that’s how Salman works.

Because if we’re being honest, almost anyone else could have delivered that exact sentence with the exact same words and nothing would have happened.

With Salman, you replay it.

You imitate the way he says it. You send it to your friends without explaining why it’s funny. Half the joke isn’t even the sentence. It’s the delivery. The complete lack of effort. That strange confidence that only Salman seems capable of carrying without looking like he’s trying too hard.

The words are almost incidental. The man is the message.

And somewhere in there is a lesson that marketers keep missing.

Salman Khan has become one of the strongest personal brands in the country, not because he has carefully crafted one, but because he has refused to become anyone else.

Think about it.

You can recognise him from a silhouette. From the way he walks. From that tiny pause before he speaks. From his grammar. From the way he throws English and Hindi together. From the slightly detached expression that somehow looks both bored and completely in control.

He has quirks most media trainers would probably ask him to iron out.

Instead, those quirks became assets. That’s what decades of consistency does.

Marketing theory has a fancy name for it. Distinctive brand assets. Memory structures. Mental availability.

Consumers don’t remember isolated messages. They remember patterns. Repetition creates familiarity, familiarity creates recall, and recall eventually becomes equity. Salman has been repeating the same emotional cues for over 30 years.

Not the same dialogue. The same identity.

Whether you love him, hate him or roll your eyes every time one of his films releases, you already know what ‘Salman’ feels like before he has even said a word.

That’s an extraordinary thing to own. Which is why I always laugh when brands try to recreate moments like these. But they’re borrowing the wrong thing. The value isn’t sitting inside the phrase.

The value is sitting inside three decades of accumulated cultural memory attached to the person saying it.

That’s the part you can’t steal. Virality loves to pretend it’s democratic. It isn’t. The internet didn’t make ‘Sonam, it’s done bro’ iconic. It simply recognised Salman Khan being Salman Khan.

Maybe that’s the lesson marketers should be paying attention to.

We’re so busy chasing virality that we’ve forgotten to build memorability.

Virality is borrowed attention. Brand equity is accumulated memory.

One can be manufactured for a weekend.

The other has to be earned, one recognisable moment at a time.

Adyasha Roy Tomar is senior creative director, Leo India.

The article first appeared in the August issue of Manifest, which can be purchased here.