Guide Note

A relatively new form of marketing, viral marketing focuses on increasing brand awareness through people passing the brand's message on to other people. Viral marketing often comes in the form of online videos, online games, eBooks, free software, or social network applications. Marketers utilizing viral marketing are attempting to make their message spread exponentially among preexisting social networks.

Fast Facts

1. Term coined by Harvard professor Jeffrey F. Rayport in 1996
2. Viral marketing is intended to be spread like a computer virus or pathological virus
3. Multi-level marketing was an early form of viral marketing
4. Viral marketing primarily occurs on the internet

One of the earliest examples of viral marketing was Hotmail's method of gaining new subscribers by including a brief ad for the service at the bottom of all user emails. This way, any user who signed up ended up passing the message on to all his friends and associates.

Another successful viral marketing campaign was Burger King's The Subservient Chicken, which became popular in 2004. Visitors to the website could give commands to a video of man in a chicken suit, and he would obediently (and often comically) carry them out. Delighted users recommended it to their friends, sending millions of people to the Burger King site.

• "Viral marketing has become the Holy Grail for Internet marketers looking to copy the success of Hotmail or ICQ. Most everyone wants to take his or her product and 'make it viral.'—Blake Rohrbacher, ClickZ

• "We're all involved in the future of advertising. Anyone with a video blog is, potentially, just one irresistible offer away from becoming a corporate stooge, a sock puppet, a product placer, an astroturfer, a shill. An industry that once confined itself to Madison Avenue is now operating from your town, your street, your bedroom."—Wired