Traditional advertising for many years has been based on one-to-many model of broadcast technology. However with the emergence of the Internet people realized that there are many other ways of marketing a product or service and most importantly this one-to-many principal doesn’t really work on the Internet always. One such approach to marketing on the Internet is called viral marketing.
Viral marketing is basically creating messages and convincing the receivers of these messages to spread the word to the others. Take hotmail the classic example for viral marketing. During the days where only a privileged set of people had access to e-mail, they came up with this brilliant idea of providing free e-mail addresses and other services. They did nothing else than attaching a tag "Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com" at the bottom of each free message sent by the people who joined initially. Not only others saw this tag, they jumped at the opportunity of getting a free e-mail address. As a result hotmail achieved phenomenal success within months and the rest is history.
Another contemporary example is Blue Marble's marketing for Scope mouthwash, which won the CASIE award recently. They allowed the consumers to send a customized and animated, email "kiss" to their friends. This became an instant hit as millions of people started kissing via e-mails. This not only reinforced the Scope brand but also emphasized that it brings people "kissable close."
I hope you have received many funny emails that were forwarded to you through your friends. The reason for him/her to forward you an e-mail is most probably it was interesting for him/her and he/she assumes that this may interest you as well. If you consider a particular e-mail chances are many others around you have also seen the same email. This is the beauty of the Internet. Along with its email lists, websites, chat rooms and bulletin boards it becomes an environment which is very conducive to viral marketing.
Consider ICQ, another great example for viral marketing. Initially when nobody was using instant messaging it was not that useful to anyone. So if I signed up for ICQ but my friends didn’t have it, I would start telling all my friends about it, encouraging them to download the ICQ software. This is another behavioral aspect of human beings, successfully exploited by pioneers of viral marketing such as ICQ.
All these examples insist that, if you have a message which is both compelling enough to spread and firmly supports a brand's values, viral marketing provides an excellent opportunity to exploit. However this is always tricky because it has the potential to backfire if the message ended up being passed on to someone you would rather not be associated with such as a competitor. Then he can counter attack your marketing strategy taking ideas or getting information from your message.
In addition it runs the risk of brand dilution. In viral marketing you market your products and services through people who are not well versed in your brand to do the selling for you. Therefore it is highly possible that they promote a wrong picture about the company. As such it is important to carefully craft a message that is strong enough to bear their misinterpretations. However in doing so, you need to make it compelling enough for them so that they voluntarily spread it around.
Despite some of these limitations, viral marketing is increasingly becoming popular mainly due to its scope. Once you hit it the opportunities are endless and the scope is unimaginable. It takes only a simple idea to make you a billionaire. So why are you waiting still?
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