Viral Marketing

Hi guys

I recently came to understand the jist of Viral Marketing during my MBA course.

Since Last 3 years, I used to wonder over forward mails I continuously kept on getting. Some were, pure fun and seemed like Amateur work. But at the same time, there used to be lot of clips, which were pure animations. These ad clips seemed to be quite professional and costly too.

I used to ask my friends, that how can a company like Coke and Pepsi afford to let such a costly work to be stolen and sent on net. And the other angel was that these are cuttings of the full ads, which these companies might be showing in other countries.

In total, I couldn’t get the clear cut answer.

But, during MBA in Marketing courses, I came to understand the advertisement focuses mainly on number of impressions the ad creates on the target audience. The companies select many channels simultaneously like TV, radio, hoardings,…..

At the same time, I came to know about WOM or Word of Mouth publicity. It is the best possible publicity any company can aim for. Its more like reference marketing. Here, one of the friends or know person recommends or tells the other person about the product. And this way, it creates a chain reaction. And the information or publicity spreads like a virus. This is the basis of Viral Marketing.

With the onset of Internet, the viral marketing has taken new dimension. Here, most of the people, irrespective of the age and background, circulates any interesting or useful information in the form of forwards mails to their friends. The biggest enabler is huge mail box capacity especially provided by companies like Yahoo and Google.

And the concept is the funnier or more out of the box mail is, more its circulated.

Recently, I worked with one of the company, which wanted me to launch a viral marketing campaign for it. But, the biggest challenge was how to measure its impact.

I haven’t come across any solid method of measuring the impact. But, yes on discussing with few professionals associated with Viral Marketing, one of the method is the number of emails coming back to you from different sources.

You can find the Viral Marketing campaigns by Pepsi and Amul in this post below.

To know more about Viral Marketing one can visit here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_marketing