The premise of viral marketing relies heavily on the word of mouth (WOM) promotion provided by consumers. According to Margaret Rouse, viral marketing can be defined as “any marketing technique that induces websites or users to pass on a marketing message to other sites or users, creating a potentially exponential growth in the message’s visibility and effect.” In summary, viral marketing is a method of promotion that rapidly spreads a message via consumers, usually through social media.

So what contributes to the success of viral marketing? In short, emotions. Viral marketing is believed to be amplified on the basis of emotions. BuzzSumo analysed 100 million articles to determine the characteristics of a viral-worthy article. It was believed that this was heavily dependent on the emotion evoked from the story. As depicted in the chart below created by Business Insider, 25% of the most shared articles across the web were stories that triggered a sense of awe. Marketers must be conscious of the following most effective emotions to increase the likelihood of their content going viral.

Viral examples

Contrary to popular belief, viral marketing strategies have been implemented for over 20 years. One of the first notable examples being the free email service, Hotmail. In 1997, Hotmail started inserting the tagline “Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com” (see example below). This was proven to be extremely successful, signing up 12 million users in 18 months, making them the fastest growing user based media company at the time. This technique has since been implemented by Apple who use the tagline “Sent from my iPhone” (see below).

One of the most iconic viral marketing examples is the Mentos and Coke experiment. A video made by Eepybird kick started the trend that went viral and sparked an abundance of videos that featured the experiment. Today, when you do a Google search for “Mentos and Coke”, you will get 7.46 million video results. The interesting part of this whole craze is the fact that neither company had a part in creating the original video, yet Coca-Cola saw a 5% sales increase and Mentos 15%. The power of viral video content is compelling.

With the rapid increase in information available on the internet, viral marketing has had to adapt. In order to capture the attention of consumers and spark e-WOM, brands need to stand out from the crowd. Depending on the brand itself, this may be through humour, surprise, outrage or shock. However, sometimes this gets taken too far and can shed a negative light on the brand.

In 2002, an Xbox ad went viral for the wrong reasons. At a time when the brand was still new, they knew they needed a way to launch themselves into the market and have an impact on consumers. This led to the creation of the ad attached below, later banned from TV after the UK’s Independent Television Commission (ITC) received 136 complaints from viewers. However, this was not the end of the ad. In a time before YouTube, the ad continued to be passed around through email and enabled the commercial to be shared over 1 million times. To this day, Xbox holds that this was beneficial for their brand.

“When you’re new, you have to be clear about what you stand for as a brand. And I think that particular idea really encapsulated everything that we were trying to represent as a new brand in the video games industry.”

Harvey Eagle, UK Advertising Manager for Xbox at the time

What are some crazy viral campaigns that you have seen? In your opinion, were they effective or just plain crazy?