Throwing the viral into the marketing mix

Posted by Ricardo | Filed under General Commentary

(revisited from our sister site in portuguese language acurvaviral.com)

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Most of the times when we think of viral marketing the first thing we think about are viral videos. That makes sense because they’re the most frequent form of virals aswell.

But that’s part only part of the communication part of an integrated marketing strategy. While viral marketing as a lot to do with the sharing in social networks, why not begin thinking about introducing the viral part on the other components of the Marketing Mix?

Let’s think about it:

A) Product: integrating the viral component in the product could mean two things: 1) for example creating a strategy in which even the conception and design of the product would be viral, like crowdsourcing it or 2) creating a produt that would be viral itself. This is easier when we’re talking about a digital product (PayPal and Hotmail area really good examples), mas how would it be the case with a physical product? Tamagoshi and Rubik’s Cube come to mind.

tamagoshi

B) Price: integrating the viral in the price component would be a challenge and we would have to be very imaginative to do it, but an example would be have a variable price depending on the number of buyers, i.e. the price would be lower as more and more people would be buying it, giving an incentive for more people to buy it. Of course this example would piss off the early adopters, and they’re very powerfull spreaders of the word, so that’s why this part is very sensitive.

Also, as Seth Godin and others have said, the price introduces a barrier for the spreading of the virus, thus slowing it down and allowing it to possibly die. So why not a freemium model? That could work out too.

C) Place: the viral component here could be integrated if we think about the following: “where and how am I going to place my product that facilitates and gives incentive for buying and the sharing of the product?” Placing products where they are the most used is something that is already common in some areas (toothbrush in bathrooms in malls, for example), and is a good strategy.

toothbrush D) Promotion: this is the most known and used component when it comes to viral marketing, so here the viral is already very well integrated and established. from videos to images, to games, websites, there’s a lot of stuff already made, mas there are, for sure, a lot of interesting things that will come out of this componet of the marketing mix.

So this is something we’ll continue to think about, and we believe that if the viral element can be introduced in the various elements of the marketing strategy, there’s a better change your product or service will be successfull.

What do you think about this?

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