Viral marketing - AKA Subservient Chicken and Elf Yourself
December 20th, 2007
There’s a hot phenomenon these days: viral marketing.
Wikipedia’s definition of “viral marketing” is:
Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet. Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily.
In other words, you see something so interesting, so funny or so stupid that you have no choice but to tell others. And this is understandable. People like to “know what’s cool”. Your self esteem gets a boost by communicating these viral videos. Using the power of personal/social networks, the marketing message will spread rapidly and if well done, your company will get high visibility at a very low cost. Try forcing all your friends to stand in front of a billboard for 5 minutes and let me know how it goes. Send them a video of yourself as an elf and let me know how that went instead.
I speak of elf as this was Office Max’s viral attempt. Basically, you go to their site and upload a picture of your face. Almost instantly you have a dancing elf sporting your own face. This is an instant hit for all ages. Kids love it and so do grown ups.
Burger king’s attempt was a humoristic site where people could command a man disguised as a chicken. Various commands were available and people were drawn in guessing how far the chicken would go. Lots of blogs were filled with comments mentioning about various commands.
Dove was bitten in their second attempt at viral marketing. Their first attempt, “Evolution” was a huge success. It showed a video of a normal but pretty girl quickly becoming a beauty queen after going through a make up session and heavy Photoshop “enhancements”. The message Unilever sent is: anyone can be a beauty queen and please buy our products as we think average janes like you are hidden treasures.
Their second attempt, Onslaught, was not a success however. Their message was not clear (talk to your daughter about beauty before the industry does). Some users modified the original video and used Unilever’s own sexist advertisements in an attempt to pressure the company. Final score Dove: 0 – Users: 1.
Moral of the story: be careful about what message you want to spread. Humour works almost all the time. Finally, don’t abuse viral marketing. It may bite back and you don’t want to be seen as a spammer.
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