Many of you know that I dislike the term “viral marketing.”  Marketing is a conversation between two or more persons and what becomes viral is not in the brands control.

The consumer is in control.

Message to brands:  let go.

If you are tasked with coming up with a “viral marketing” concept, please question the validity of the project.  As a marketer, you don’t determine what will become viral.  The crowd does (consumer).  There are ways to increase the chances that your marketing message may become viral, but in the end of the day, there is no formula.  You can do all the trend research that you want to understand your audience and what makes them tick, but that doesn’t gaurantee viral success.

There’s been quite a few marketing campaigns that were released where consumers grabbed control of them and changed the message.  Here are 10 of them.  One of my personal favorites was for Unilever products: Axe & Dove.  A consumer mashed-up Axe and Dove commercials to show how raunchy the Axe commercials were.  Putting Dove side-by-side with Axe has a lot of contrast.

How about the fake Sony blog…  Remember that?  I wrote about it almost 11 months ago… do consumers trust brands?

All of this goes to show you that even with 30MM in production budget for your next SuperBowl Ad or a $1 production budget for your next online display ad, you cannot forecast what will become viral for consumers.   If you make a solid product or service, you shouldn’t have to worry.  It should speak for itself.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 10:07 pm and is filed under Advertising & Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.