4.1. Surprise-based campaigns
In our study, surprise was the dominant emotion identified by the consumers across each campaign. The emotion of surprise is generated when something is unexpected or misexpected, with surprise resulting in responses of amazement and astonishment (Ekman & Friesen, 1975). For example, Amazon's Weapons of Mass Destruction viral marketing campaign masterfully employed the emotion of surprise. As one study respondent commented, “When the page opened, I thought I had made a mistake and got something of a virus on my PC.” Developed for Amazon by Blueyonder, an Internet service provider, the Weapons of Mass Destruction campaign sought to increase customer awareness of Amazon's many services. An e-mail was sent out instructing message recipients to type the term Weapons of Mass Destruction into the Google search bar, and to then click on the ‘I'm Feeling Lucky’ button. (This button directs searchers to the highest-ranked link page, the top paid-search position which can be bought by owners of websites.) The resulting search led to a Weapons of Mass Destruction error page developed for Amazon, which indicated that the weapons of mass destruction could not be found, and provided satirical jokes about how the U.S. government was incorrect about the existence of such weapons in Iraq. The page offered a fake blueprint for invading a country supposedly having the capability of mass destruction. The fake error page also provided three links to different pages, two of which led to an Amazon.co.uk offer for a 20% discount on a book called Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld. The other link on the page led to an Amazon.co.uk offering of t-shirts bearing anti-Iraq War slogans. The Weapons of Mass Destruction viral marketing campaign proved successful for Amazon. Of people who visited the fake error page, 30% clicked on the links to Amazon's home page, well above the average banner click-through rate of 4.7% (Gatarski, 2002).
In the nine viral marketing campaigns that were studied, the emotion of surprise was always expressed in combination with at least one of the other five primary emotions. This corroborates a previous finding that surprise is often accompanied by other primary emotions (Charlesworth, 1969).