Viral marketing

If it was too hard to find a reason for telling your girlfriend that you rather watch football at Valentine's day than a big sports brand had the outcome. You just had to send the movie down below to your girlfriend and it would all be all right.

If you just saw thirty (or so) mean-looking guys singing a love song for you than you can't say that you are not impressed and that is just the effect that such a movie needs to create. In other words the movie needs to create a buzz in order to reach a big audience.

The movie was a part of the campaign of Puma and is a good example of how well a brand can use their target group to spread their communication message. This way of communicating a message is called viral marketing and can be (if done rightly) very effective. Viral marketing means that it goes from mouth to mouth or in digital terms from web user to web user in the form of movies, pictures, e-mails, websites or games. The main aspects of an effective viral marketing campaign are:

• That it is interactive and easy to send to other people
• That people want to participate and send it to their friends
• That it should not be clear right away that the message is a campaign message
• That it is shown on social network sites
• And above all, that it is striking, surprising and unique to stand out from the crowd.

Next to Puma, there are a lot of other famous viral marketing campaigns like the Dove Evolution campaign, Nike touch of gold or the "learn how to play guitar like this too" Guitar kid. In my opinion, it is a very interesting way of communicating a campaign throughout the internet and in specific, social media. It is cheaper than using traditional media, it is fast and it concentrates really on the target group. Side effects are that is almost impossible to stop a campaign and that a campaign have to be really creative in order to be succesful.

"If the Internet can be described as a giant human consciousness, then viral marketing is the illusion of free will."

By George Pendle