Let’s make this Viral.

Every day the democratization of the internet its bigger reaching 54% of world total population on April of 2018, that represents 4.087 billion of users (Hootsuite, 2018), this can be traduced in the high marketing efficiencies by reaching  and interact with this amount of people (Petrescu & Korgaonkar, 2011) Every day the use of Internet-based advertising is increasing, and traditional such as TV, radio, magazines newspapers are losing ground, most of this interaction is based on social media, this information is used by managers to understand this potential of  the internet to complement the traditional word of mouth, and transform it into an online viral way to communicate with consumers (Petrescu & Korgaonkar, 2011). In this way, business is changing their advertising methods to suit the emerging trends in consumers by interacting with active social members that to April of 2018 reach 3.297 billion that represents the 43% of the population (Hootsuite, 2018).

Many companies like Old Spice, Levi Strauss, Nike, Chevrolet, and Burger King, Budweiser have taken the advantages that viral marketing provides by creating unusual entertainment in social media such as YouTube, Facebook, and blogs (Petrescu & Korgaonkar, 2011), in this way they increase the consumer interest in the companies products. (Rollins, Anitsal, & Anitsal, 2014) by incentivizing the word-of-mouth communication among the companies prospective target market, as friends and acquaintances exchange ads and product recommendations generating a buzz, increasing sales, revenues, market share, and reputation. (Rollins et al., 2014)

On December of 1921, Frederick R. Barnard published a piece consigning the effectiveness of graphics in advertising with the title "One look is worth a thousand words", and this phrase is widely known, but what most people don’t realize, its that one second of video, contains on an average of 24 images.

For us to understand a little bit better there are some key concepts.

 

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing its define by (Doyle, 2016) as a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message, usually by word of mouth, and the purpose of it is to encourage recipients to pass e-WOM to others (Chiu et al., 2014) nicknamed viral because the number of people exposed to a message mimics the process of passing a virus or disease from one person to another. (AMA, 2018)

Word of mouth

Word-of-mouth is defined as oral, person-to-person communication between a receiver and a communicator (consumer and a friend, colleague, or other acquaintance) whom the receiver perceives as non-commercial, regarding a brand, product, or service. (Petrescu & Korgaonkar, 2011) and studies show that consumers’ opinions about brands are more trusted than other forms of traditional advertising whether they are expressed offline or online. (Nikolinakou & King, 2018) it is also considered the oldest and, some would argue, the most effective way of gaining awareness (Doyle, 2016). Research has found that word-of-mouth communication about products is more likely to be negative than positive. (AMA, 2018)

Buzz Marketing

Buzz marketing can be defined as the amplification of initial marketing efforts by third parties and it includes spreading the message about new products or brand experiences, that are being transmitted from peer-to-peer, and it differentiate from viral marketing mostly because viral marketing is used for electronic media, while buzz marketing can be used in traditional word of mouth, and all physical interactions. (Petrescu & Korgaonkar, 2011)

Online Marketing

The promotional use of the full range of web tools, and *advertising techniques to promote products and services (Doyle, 2016)

Social Media

Social media is the collective terms for online communication (Doyle, 2016) on the Web 2.0 Internet-based applications (Kumar & Agrawal, 2017) (Devereux, Melewar, & Foroudi, 2017) (Thomas & Woodside, 2016), where the main dynamic its collaboration (Doyle, 2016) and exchanging information in the form of user-generated content or ideas, feelings, emotions, expressions, views pictures, videos etc. (Devereux et al., 2017) to interact and engage with users which can be family and friends and in that way stay up-to-date (Kumar & Agrawal, 2017), the biggest social media platforms to 2018 are Facebook and YouTube.

YouTube it’s the second most visited website and the time spend on average on this website its 08:15 (Hootsuite, 2018), Facebook it’s the third one with just after youtube.com but people spend more time on it with an average of 11:08 minutes per day according to Alexa’s ranking (Hootsuite, 2018), the amount of time spent each day on these platforms average makes them an important channel reach potential customers.

Theory development

On a typical day of work consumers browse many pages o the internet, and when they find something interesting and meaningful they may take the time to share it with their friends and acquaintances, viral video advertising its opportunity for brands to spread reach and engage with consumers (Nikolinakou & King, 2018) that in the last decade had a significant growth, just in 2010 social video advertising views increased by 230%, that’s over nine times the growth in online search and display advertising (Tucker, 2014) important companies like, Amazon, Adidas, and Samsung had employ viral video advertising to increase their exposure, as well as to position their brands as trendsetters in the global market (Nikolinakou & King, 2018).

Viral videos can be develop by companies in form of ad or non-commercial which in many opportunities get more views than commercial ones. In the case of a Michael Senatore a kid from Charlotte, North Carolina who in his senior talent show at Ardrey Kell High School had no idea what to do, he couldn’t dance, couldn’t sing, and cannot play an instrument, so he decide to flip a bottle, but what make this video special that it was been seen more than 70 million times on the internet, and make this kid so famous that he even got invited to “flip bottles” to “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”. So what makes this video so special? Its just a kid flipping a bottle; in fact what makes this video special its not even the flipping bottle, it’s how the reaction of the audience makes you feel as a viewer, the drama music, and one of the things that makes it more pleasant its that before the bottle flip there’s someone that says “this its not gonna work”, all this factors create the viralness of this video, but how?

Studies had show that numerous factors influence the viralness of a video, emotions experience by the viewer (and the strength with which they are felt) trigger sharing behaviour (Nelson-Field, Riebe, & Newstead, 2013). Multiple emotions had been studied and the can be divided in to groups, positive and negative emotion and this can be divided once again in two categories high arousal and low arousal 

Analyses indicated that high arousal emotional (either in their positive or negative form) attract as twice as videos that provoke low arousal emotions (Nelson-Field et al., 2013). In the “bottle flip” video we can find positive emotions, there great amount of exhilaration after Michael Senatore is able to achieve the trick and all his classmates explode on joy, this is one of the main reasons why this video becomes viral so easily, but another important aspect that (Nelson-Field et al., 2013) found its that non-Commercial videos usually gain more shares than commercial videos.

From a managerial perspective it's important to understand the qualities need for a video to get viral, (Nelson-Field et al., 2013) concluded that alone an emotional response to the viral campaign it's not enough incentivize consumers to share content and hat the inclusion of an element of surprise is key to diffusion.

One of the characteristics of viral videos is that they gain traction in social media so quickly, often within hours of initial reports, and they fade quickly as well (Broxton, Interian, Vaver, & Wattenhofer, 2010), so its important to that the ads comes with a integration with other sources of information such as TV ads, news paper etc., where word of mouth, buzz marketing and online marketing play an important role. Studies show that integrated campaigns are 31% more effective at building brands and marketers can integrate across ads in a variety of ways and if the campaign it’s integrated and customized can be 57% more effective than non-integrated campaigns (Millward Brown, 2017)

Something is for sure, even if a video whit high arousal is created by marketers there is no guarantee that it will go truly viral, the best guarantee that can be offered for brands its that high arousal content at least will be more shared than a low arousal and also will have more chances to go viral.  Because at least for what we knew there is no “one size fits all” answer. To achieve a successful viral marketing campaign is specific to individual characteristics and the approaches used and in order to the ad to create awareness of the brand it should be integrated into a bigger marketing campaign so the consumer can relate the brand when given certain types of brand associations.

Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoy it!

References

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