Is viral marketing an effective tool?

Résumé du document

Many people today believe that there are too many advertisements, and this is not just an opinion since advertisers estimate that an individual sees from 600 to 800 advertisements per day. Everyone is basically saying the same thing, and that is the amount of advertising is too much to avoid generating a saturation point and a drop in consumer interest.
So, in order to involve consumers in dissemination of the message and to make more attractive advertisements, marketers are using viral marketing with increasing frequency.

Viral marketing is a quite simple technique. It is when a message is given to the consumer that provides him with everything he needs in order to convey that same message to other potential consumers around him.
This technique lends itself to interactive marketing due to global networks and the Internet community, which make it possible to transmit information easily and facilitate communication between users. It can also seem disconcerting since it is so simple that we wonder why no one has used it before, although it is a tool that is based on a well-known concept: word of mouth.

Extraits

[...] We have defined what viral marketing is. Now it's time to discover how to build a viral strategy. In order to do this, some rules must be followed. Dr Ralph F. Wilson gives us some ideas for producing efficient viral marketing strategies. “Accept this fact. Some viral marketing strategies work better than others, and few work as well as the simple Hotmail.com strategy. But below are the six basic elements you hope to include in your strategy. A viral marketing strategy need not contain ALL these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. [...]

[...] In accordance with relationship marketing, which emerged in the early 80s, the client, as a unique individual, must be placed at the heart of corporate strategy. The new economy has reinforced the idea of personalized marketing for each customer. So, is viral marketing really an effective tool to use in response to the upheaval of the new economy? How can we implement such a strategy? Firstly, we must understand what viral marketing is exactly. In the case of Blentec, we discover that viral marketing utilizes many tools in order to be efficient. [...]

[...] Nuss, Edition d'organisations Rumeurs, le plus vieux média du monde, J.N. [...]

[...] CONCLUSION To conclude, we can say that viral marketing, which was born with the Internet and is dependent upon it for growth, is a powerful tool, but one that is difficult to handle. As we have seen from this paper, it was already well-known that word of mouth was powerful. However, the Internet amplified this phenomenon, and the particularities of electronic word of mouth are now expected by today's consumers. In addition, it is conceivable that Internet users will be open to the tools that result from the viral strategy. [...]

[...] Someone passes the word on to a few friends who do the same themselves, and nothing more is needed for certain jokes or rumours to spread across the globe in less than a day. With e-mail, distances disappear, and communications are virtually instantaneous. "Beware the power of viral marketing", recommends Kim Brooks. Indeed, leverage can be enormous and beyond the capabilities of an enterprise. Not all websites are able to cope with a 100-fold increase in traffic on any given day. [...]