Viral marketing has been said to be the best thing that has happened to marketers after the invention of advertisements. The recent explosion of social networking sites has greatly fuelled the fire, allowing viral ads to spread quickly and widely. However, viral marketing has been gathering a bad name in recent times.
In a blog by a fellow student Holland, it is discussed how Toyota developed a marketing campaign for its Matrix model, targeting males between 20 and 35, that allowed anyone to sign up a friend of theirs for a prank. Yet this quickly got out of hand, resulting in a woman sueing a prank victim. The ultimate conclusion of the post being that the “risk of something going wrong (in viral marketing) is often much higher than conventional methods, and so they present a liability to the companies that use them.” You can read the blog here: https://blogs.ubc.ca/hollandninow/
I agree that it is a dangerous game to play, but take a slightly different view, as does an American blogger Seth Godin, that “Viral marketing only works well when you plan for it, when you build it in, when you organize your offering to be spreadable, interesting and to work better for everyone involved when it spreads.”
He believes the reason for this technique getting a bad name is due to clueless marketers slapping a “goofy viral thing” on a lame product and waiting for it to spread. In Toyota’s case, the idea was solid; trying to break down the psychological factors of males in that age range of distrusting advertisements by presenting something they love to do; prank their friends. Although the poor planning allowed it to get out of hand, causing problems for the company.
However, in this day and age, I believe there are valuable benefits of viral marketing. Planned and executed properly, it provides a cheap but effective way of creating brand awareness and achieving other marketing objectives (such as product sales). We are living in a technological revolution, and the popularity of social networking sites and the Internet in general are growing, providing endless opportunities for companies.
The movie Cloverfield is an example of a successful marketing campaign, combining the movie poster where they hid the monster from the movie in the clouds (it has been accentuated in the below pic) with clues that were gradually released until the movie debuted, creating plenty of hype around the world.
