Viral Marketing Overview

From The Yaffe Center

I. Introduction

Traditional marketing, such as a television ad showcasing a laundry detergent’s relative cleaning power, is a linear marketing strategy, the goal of which is grab a consumer’s attention for long enough to deliver a scripted message. Buzz marketing represents a divergent marketing strategy; its goal is to leverage the impressions created by an initial marketing message by inciting consumers to organically spread that message or an interpretation of that message through the consumer’s social or professional network. Buzz marketing can serve a wide variety of products and be implemented in countless ways. The one thing that all Buzz campaigns have in common is that they get consumers and media outlets to spread the message for free. Outside of that, Buzz, if properly executed, can serve any product or service. Some campaigns use the internet to allow consumers to spread information or participate in games or contests, other campaigns attempt to get the mainstream media to pick up a story or piece of content and spread it to consumers, who will then talk about it with each other, still other campaigns offer free products to consumers in the hope that they will then tell their friends about it. Pick any media where information can be transferred, any product category, and any genre of marketing content, from purely functional to purely entertaining with no over commercial message at all, and Buzz marketers have attempted to find a winning combination of those factors to accomplish their business goals.

The purpose of this paper is to provide marketers with an understanding of the intellectual underpinnings of Buzz marketing and a strategic and tactical framework for harnessing the power of Buzz marketing. Through the structured approach described in this paper, marketers will gain the ability launch and manage a Buzz marketing campaign in a way that will optimize ROI, however that goal may be defined. The tactics in this paper are also tools that a marketer can use to manage a spontaneously occurring Buzz campaign/naturally occurring brand buzz to generate incremental ROI from ongoing traditional campaigns.