How campaigns go viral?

Have you ever wondered how marketing campaigns go viral? I mean out of the many campaigns that were produced in one year, how does that few campaigns be able to break through the clutter, go viral and make their ad be remembered by audiences? Take this marketing campaign ad by the Dollar Shave Club for example.

How this viral video came about is because founder Michael Dubin and Mark Levine have just founded the Dollar Shave Club and they want their brand to be known so they come up with this idea of producing a video to introduce their company and what they do to their target audiences. Basically, it worked, and the video went viral with a total of 26 million YouTube views and a total of 3.2 million subscribers to their services today.

So how did this dollar shave club video go viral? One of the main reasons would be the power of word-of-mouth. This is because whenever we see something interesting or funny, we should always want to share it with someone else, such as our friends, family or even share it on our social media accounts so that our friends, or followers can see it too. So, this process of sharing is called word-of-mouth.

According to Jonah Berger’s Principles of Contagiousness, there are 6 factors as to why a marketing campaign such as the Dollar Shave Club’s video went viral and this is shown below.

These days, whenever we see something that is interesting or funny to us, we tend to share it and therefore, when this is first uploaded to YouTube, it triggers the audiences’ emotions, and this encourages people to share it with their friends. This comes to show how the video were able to reach 3 million views in just one day.

Also, the amount of viewership shows the remarkability of this video and has indeed left an impression on people due to its humour, which just makes people want to share it with their friends. As the Dollar Shave Club offers high quality razors at a more affordable price as compared to their competitors, this makes people want to share the information and video even more. Hence, this helps to form an immediate word-of-mouth.

However, not all campaigns are so lucky that they will go viral. Some campaigns used viral marketing but ended up with the campaign being a flop so why is this so? Take this example of marketing commercial by Fanta for their 75th anniversary celebration in 2017.

It started out as a commercial with a very simple message behind it and that is they want to celebrate their 75th anniversary as a brand and they want to bring us back and give us a brief lesson as to how Fanta came to become a brand they are today.

Sadly, this was faced with a lot of online backlash as instead of triggering nostalgia and the feeling of ‘good old times’, it triggered unhappiness, sadness and anger as audiences are showed how Fanta was being created by the Germans during World War 2 and these brings back the memories of how people suffered during the war and therefore, the Coca-Cola company have no choice but to remove this video and apologise for offending anyone. Even though Coca-Cola may have removed the video, to make people forget about this incident, but people who watched will remember and will never forget it.

But, as there is a saying by Phineas T. Barnum that goes, “all publicity is good publicity” so maybe this Fanta commercial won’t be such a flop after all as it did make people remember about their brand.

Even with that said, brands would always want audiences to remember them positively rather than negatively and there might really be a thing called bad publicity. Therefore, viral marketing should be thought and plan through carefully before using it to achieve the best kind of results.