Viral Marketing
Viral marketing encourages word-of-mouth promotion by capitalizing on social networks and
customers’ desire to contribute to and share message content with their peers. A viral marketing campaign
is more likely to succeed when the message content is able to highly resonate with the target audience and
appeal to this group’s motivations for sharing information. Consumers who are more individualistic (in
that they want to differentiate themselves from others) and/or more altruistic tend to be those who are also
most likely to forward online conฟGuerilla Marketing
Online communications channels have also helped in increasing the effectiveness of guerilla
marketing campaigns. Levinson (1993) first introduced the concept of guerilla marketing, identifying
these campaigns as those intended for small businesses. Guerilla campaigns are characterized by their low
cost but extreme effectiveness in building a firm’s reputation through generating buzz and favorable
consumer perceptions. Guerilla marketing is creative, energetic, and flexible. Online venues allow for
guerilla marketing messages to be virally spread within blogs and social networks, thereby increasing the
relative exposure and effectiveness of the program when compared to offline guerilla venues alone. The
effectiveness of such a campaign can be measured by such metrics as the attendance at guerilla events, the
sales and customer acquisitions that result, and the effects on company’s website traffic. tent (Ho & Dempsey, 2008). In general, there are three types of
strategies that marketers can use to seed a viral campaign: seeding emails, online advertising, or offline
advertising. Once a campaign has been initiated, it is crucial that marketers effectively manage every
stage by analyzing the source of the viral content invitation; if and when a customer accesses the viral
campaign page; and the number of referrals a customer makes to his or her friends