Sunday, July 13, 2008

Viral Marketing

Wiki puts it as "Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses". Click here to learn more.
I don't know if you were a part of the latest "Download Day 2008"? Was there some thing existing before this year as a download day? Why was it done? The answer is it was the FF or the Mozilla Firefox developers who chose such a marketing strategy to get their "huge" chunk of internet browser users. Mozilla was no bad previously. But this time they made sure they shut doors on many browsers even the IE most likely ;-).
The strategy they adopted to get the Download day a grand success is called viral marketing. For those wondering what success did it achieve on that day, the answer is they have entered the Guinness Book of records for the most downloaded software in a day. Eye popping numbers 8 Million Downloads in a day!!!.
This is a typical case study for the B-minded people.
When i say a case study I am reminded of yet another marketing strategy adopted by Cello company. They were new in the market and wanted the Brand Recognition to happen in the first place. So they had announced in the news papers that "reps from our company will call to your house number randomly anytime between xx and yy. If you correctly say cello instead of hello you will get nice gift vouchers etc etc." The whole of the chennai city went on saying cello cello for every call they got. Did they (the company) make a call or not... who cares. their objective was to recognize their brand. They did it. So marketing is very powerful when its cheap and creative but more importantly if it does meet the objective.

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