Viral Marketing
Recherche de Documents : Viral Marketing. Recherche parmi 300 000+ dissertationsPar zagdiaz • 27 Mai 2013 • 377 Mots (2 Pages) • 753 Vues
Not surprisingly therefore, a recent marketing technique that is becoming
popular for businesses is viral marketing, “word-of-blog” marketing or “viral buzz”
marketing as it is otherwise known. Viral marketing, as defined by Moore (2003)
as
“the name applied to a group of family resemblant marketing strategies using
network-enhanced word-of-mouth.”
Viral marketing can be used for passing along adverts, animations, photos,
hyperlinked promotions, newsletters, games, press releases, petitions or
whatever else will advertise your business. This type of marketing encourages
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individuals to pass on information that they receive in a hypermedia environment
to friends and acquaintances (Moore, 2003). The way in which data and
information is sent between users in viral marketing creates a chain effect that
spreads the message, or purpose, of the sent content onto the next user, and
therefore the cycle continues onto the user after that. As Mohammed and Fisher
(2003) suggest, viral marketing generates a ‘buzz’ around a product or service,
created by user-to-user recommendation. It has been noted by Mohammed et al
(2003), that users are more likely to trust recommendations made by friends or
acquaintances on a product or service, rather than the company themselves.
This is one reason why products that are part of a viral marketing campaign tend
to ‘take off’ in popularity very quickly. Evidently, this is the reason that
businesses are now starting to understand the possibilities and opportunities
that viral marketing can create for them.
2.3.1 History
Viral marketing was first recognised in 1997 following the rapid growth of the
email service “Hotmail” through the “invite friends” request. Hotmail is a key
example of how quickly business may become successful using viral marketing,
as Simonsen (2008) states its users grew from 500,000 in 1996 to 12,000,000
users just a year later. The film ‘The Blair Witch Project’ is also considered to be
a pioneer for viral marketing techniques, with its use of the Internet to
communicate ‘leaked’ information to the wider audience (Mohr, 2007). Marketing
in this way had not been seen before on the Internet. Previously, companies
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