Traditional marketing is about promoting the product, showing how good it is, giving it centre stage – and generally footing the cost for all of the advertisements distribution.
Viral marketing, instead, is based on the strategy that if a product or information is useful, unusual and/or funny individuals will instead pass on the message to others free of charge, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.
Off the Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as “word-of-mouth,” “creating a buzz,” “leveraging the media,” “network marketing.” But on the Internet, for better or worse, it’s called “viral marketing.”
Viral marketing all about a good story. When 42 Below Vodka put out their series of Internet films, the main ingredient was not the vodka, but the story. Replace the product with another one, and it would still be great. When Sony made their Bravia TV ads, the product was not even seen – yet everyone remembers it.
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As the volume of unsolicited email, telemarketing calls, pamphlets and sales brochures increases, viral marketing is rapidly becoming more important. This is because buyers are coming to rely more on their peers to learn about and recommend new products or services than advertisements which often fall short of the truth.
The Hotmail.com Example
The classic example of viral marketing is Hotmail.com, one of the first free Web-based e-mail services. The strategy is simple:
- Give away free e-mail addresses and services,
- Attach a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out: “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com” and,
- Then stand back while people e-mail to their own network of friends and associates,
- Who see the message,
- Sign up for their own free e-mail service, and then
- Propel the message still wider to their own ever-increasing circles of friends and associates.
Like tiny waves spreading ever farther from a single pebble dropped into a pond, a carefully designed viral marketing strategy ripples outward extremely rapidly.
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