Viral Marketing

Viral marketing (also referred to as buzz or grassroots marketing) takes advantage of preexisting social networks and new media technologies to increase brand awareness and drive product trials and sales. Viral campaigns work by seeding or infecting a select group of socially active recipients with a marketing message, which they then spread through their social networks much like a viral epidemic. Within media theory, viral marketing is consistent with the two-step flow model developed by Katz and Lazarsfeld in the 1940s, which asserts that the media influence a minority of individuals, called opinion leaders, who, in turn, influence their peers through interpersonal communication.

The founders of Hotmail, a free email service, are credited with coining the term viral marketing in 1996. Originally, it described the practice of appending advertising about the email service to users' outgoing messages, thus turning each user into a viral agent who infected others with every message sent. Hotmail gained 12 million subscribers in 18 months at a total cost of $500,000, compared to $20 million spent by its nearest competitor, Juno, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of viral marketing.

Viral campaigns have become increasingly sophisticated in nature and use both online channels, such as email, websites, and instant messaging, and offline channels, such as text messaging, paging, and wordof-mouth. Commonly recognized types of viral marketing include pass-along viral, which involves the forwarding of content that users find interesting or entertaining; incentive viral, which offers various rewards to users for disseminating information or providing referrals; and undercover viral, which poses as nonmarketing content in the form of websites, videos, or games. Successful viral campaigns can produce significant increases in sales or awareness but may backfire if consumers question their authenticity.

[Page 868]Adolescents are particularly susceptible to viral marketing for two reasons. First, having grown up with new media technologies such as email and instant messaging, they are almost constantly connected to a wide network of peers. Second, adolescents are greatly influenced by their peers and aspire to fit in within social groups. Viral marketing exploits the combination of these factors by infiltrating young people's social networks and channels of communication. Tweens (children ages 9 to 13) are a particularly attractive marketing target, as they are in the process of forming identities and lifelong consumer preferences. Viral marketing is also seen as effective in reaching media-savvy teens who have become immune to advertisements in mainstream media, such as television and radio.

Viral marketing has been used successfully to promote a wide range of product categories to children and adolescents, including carbonated drinks, cosmetics, movies, music, and even motor oil. Noncommercial actors also recognize the effectiveness of viral marketing. For example, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Centers for Disease Control and Prevention incorporated viral components in a social marketing campaign aimed at increasing levels of physical exercise among tweens.

One viral technique that is gaining popularity among youth marketers involves the recruitment of highly social teens, who are seeded with marketing messages and samples of new products. Viral teens then share their opinions about these products with peers, in effect acting as brand advocates. This technique, however, has come under attack by consumer advocacy groups, which argue that viral teens often neglect to disclose that they have been solicited by marketers to endorse their brands. The stealth nature of viral marketing among youth raises a number of ethical concerns and is, perhaps, its most alarming feature, one that has yet to be adequately addressed by media researchers and policymakers.

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