Viral Marketing:Doing it differently

In 1999 a Hollywood movie “The Blair Witch Project” was released. The movie was a smashing hit with the highest cost to profit ratio ever. It is said to have earned approximately $10,000 for every dollar spent and featured in the Guinness Book of Records. This was quite a noteworthy achievement considering the fact that it was made at a total cost of just $35,000, it earned approximately $248 million.
Apart from the creative genius of the directors and the crew, the biggest reason for its success was the manner in which it was marketed. The movie was promoted as based on a true story and after its release the crew clarified that it isnt and is just a work of fiction. But the crew was so successful in placing it in the minds of its viewers in such a way that till date a lot of people still believe it to be true.
The film was marketed heavily via the Internet, and parts of the film were aired on TV as a series, leading to heated speculation on the internet as to whether the film was real or not. The teaser poster and other advertisements for the film were designed to reinforce that it is a documentary based on real footages, leading many people to think the film was an actual documentary, and that the three protagonists really had disappeared in the woods. To reinforce this idea, a TV channel aired a fake documentary, Curse of the Blair Witch,that claimed to investigate the Blair Witch legend before the film's release. It contained interviews with friends and relatives of the missing students, paranormal experts, and local historians (all fabricated). This was done so extensively that the three main actors were listed for a time as "missing, presumed dead" on IMDb website. While attending the Cannes Film Festival, the producers put up missing posters featuring the three stars of the films so that people could believe them to be real students who got lost while working on a project about the “Blair witch” and are now presumed dead. Even today the official website of the movie (http://www.blairwitch.com/) has sections which are dedicated to the story claiming it to be true and has pictures of the three “missing” film students and clips of the footage that was recovered about a year later after they went “missing”.
The producers and directors never expected it to do so well and were actually hoping it would make it as a TV release movie on cable TV.
The movie went on to become a source of a lot of debate and inspiration among the marketing fraternity for the unconventional methods used to promote it. And the reason was mainly that it was only the well thought out marketing strategy which made it the runaway success that it turned out to be. It is needless to say that had it all been done the usual way it would have failed to make a mark. It started a trend which has now become cult of sorts. This trend was the use of internet and other networking techniques to produced desired effects.
More recently the Barack Obama presidential campaign can be a very good example of how viral marketing is turning out to be an effective tool in marketing mainly because of its wide reach and low cost execution. The campaign has a social-networking site with powerful, instant peer-to-peer communication. It has features like "create your own event" and "create your own Obama group,". Obama HQ provides tools for these people to meet, organize, fund-raise and canvass voters. It however does not interfere with the communication within these groups and also doesnt dictate the content posted on the site. The chat rooms and events on barackobama.com, such as "Jazz Brunch for Obama Fundraiser," "Anime Fans for Obama" and "Barack the Kitchen Club," show the true potential of the viral branding. It can be rightly said that for the first time, the democratic power of the Internet has truly been harnessed in a presidential election campaign. Infact our Indian politicians can take a cue from Obama and take similar initiatives as it is a great way to involve the country's youth.
The term viral marketing used to denote marketing mainly through internet and was coined by a Harvard Business School professor, Jeffrey F. Rayport. Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use social and often unofficial networks to produce brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives through processes, which are very similar to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be done by word-of-mouth or enhanced by the effects of the Internet. Viral marketing facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily. Viral promotions can be in the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages.
It is a known fact that a satisfied customer tells an average of three people about a product or service he/she likes, and eleven people about a product or service which he/she did not like. The goal of marketers interested in creating successful viral marketing programs is to identify such individuals and events which will be able to create messages that appeal to this segment and have a high probability of being passed along. The driving force in any case would be the amount of curiosity that such messages generate. Are they interesting enough for people to go on reading the whole message and even pass it on to their peers is what drives the whole movement of passing it along.
If it works out then it is immensely powerful, usually having 500-1000 times greater impact than what we get from regular advertisements. If truly harnessed, this source can give us access to unlimited number of users in the form of bloggers, readers, viewers etc. And also this tool has an edge over other methods in terms of the cost involved as the cost of posting a viral message over the internet is very low as compared to placing an ad on television or even in magazines in certain cases. Going by that we can say that it is the future of marketing in the times to come as we see an explosion of internet users and mobile phone users and the growing popularity of blogs and social networking sites like Orkut and Facebook.
What is interesting is that more often than not such initiatives become like a movement or a cult with which people begin to associate themselves. For them it becomes more about their personality at times or about a cause close to their heart. Which explains why, after Blair witch project the internet was flooded with blogs about horror movies and real life supernatural events. Needless to say that the curiosity and the sense of association generated with it is mostly enough to take the campaign to the next level. As it brings like minded people together whose collective passion and zeal takes it forward. One person connects with the other and then a group forms and then two groups interact and a bigger group is formed. And all this happens without the company or the person who started this movement spending ridiculous amount of money as it happens in case of the conventional forms of marketing and promotions. It snow balls into something so big that advertisers swear they could never have created such an impact even if they employed their entire advertising arsenal.
Internet can become a powerful tool, not only to create a brand image but also to maintain it through constant feedback obtained in a matter of seconds. As global economics continue to cloud the future of the industry, the meltdown, will drive more money to the Internet—a much cheaper medium and has definitely more measurable reach and results.....