Viral marketin has something of a bad reputation as in itself it is a form a organic marketing. Viral marketing owes much to more traditional network marketing as it relies on individuaks being encourages to pass on merketing messages to others. Viral marketing is increasingly being used on the internet, where millions of email marketing message are distributed each day.
The concept works very much like a virus, hence the term, as it begins with a selected group of indivuas, who are emailed with a marketing message offering them some form of incentive to transmit the message to other known email accounts. The growth is exponential and from this initial handful of individuals, millions of arketing messages can be distributed troughout the internet in matter od days. In many respects, aside from the fact that there are incentives for people to pass the message on, this is a form of word-of-mouth communication. Effective viral marketing strategies tend to have the following characteristics:
- most offer free or discounted products or services;
- the simplicity of email allows each recipient to bulk email the message on to other users;
- the exponential growth is achieved not by the originator of the email, but by the recipients of the email;
- common motivators and behaviours are exploited (e.g easy money);
- it utilizes existing communication networks;
- above all, it takes advantage of others’ ressources and not the originator’s ressources.
From :
Goldsmith, Russell, Viral Marketing: Get your audience to Do your Markting for You. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2002.
Perry, Richard and Whittaker, Andrew, Viral Marketing in a Week, London: Hodder and Stoughton Education, 2002.
