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Prepersonal Literature : Literature Review Of Viral Marketing

Decent Essays

Literature review
Definition Viral Marketing
The term ‘Viral Marketing’ describes the phenomenon by which a marketing technique that uses preexisting social networking services and induces websites to pass on marketing message to other users and sites that creates a potential exponential growth in brand awareness and to achieve marketing objectives. It is a marketing strategy that focuses on broadcasting brand image and awareness hence motivating a buyer to purchase a product even though it might be more costly than other products. Kaplan and Heinlein (2011) further define it as an ‘electronic word of mouth’ whereby a form of marketing message is related to the company brand or product which is conveyed in an exponential growing way, mainly by the use of social media and websites.
Viral marketing has many different dimensions but only 4 of them appear to be the most relevant and dominant;
1. Solicitation
First of all viral marketing may be offered with or without solicitation and may or may not be sought. De Bruyn and Lilien (2008) and Phelps et al. (2004) all suggest that while consumers often find that unsolicited commercial messages coming from a company irritating, information about a company is not considered ‘junk’ if it comes from someone they already know an example Pepsi using Mohamed Salah in their commercials to attract their Egyptian customers. This is because the consumer assumes that the person passed along the message for a reason. East et al discovered

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