Learners, welcome to the segment Viral Marketing. This will be the agenda. I'll talk about what is viral marketing? And then explain how it can be done. It's done by making brands more ownable by being more open and controlled. And by finding something that globally resonates across different countries. And finally, I'll finish it off by talking about the pros and cons of memes. So let's get started. Here what is viral marketing? Here we have this very long definition but I think the key aspects are that something that spreads very fast. And it's reflected in this word disseminate. And whereas before it was person to person and therefore called word of mouth, more and more it's something that can be done online. With that said viral information is not new. So in my opinion, something like a cave painting in Altamira could be something that cavemen tens of thousands of years ago saw and copied. So anything that can be copied, which is also referred to as a meme, is a source of viral marketing or viral information spreading. But of course nowadays because of the Internet, not just the Internet but also other digital media, the best example of that recently, of course, is Psy with his Gangnam Style. And so I will have an interview with one of his managers as to how they did it at YG Entertainment. So in just a couple of weeks, it was able to be downloaded and copied by over a billion people. So I think it's still a record for something that went viral that fast. So that's the question, why or how you, too, can become viral. So I'll be honest, rode the coattails of that viral video, and wrote a viral blog on HBR. So my online article on Harvard Business Review in 2012, that too was I think read by over 100,000 people. And there, I argue that to become viral yourself, to be like Gangnam Style, you have to do the following. You have to make yourself, your brand ownable, that you have to allow consumers to easily adopt and restyle and make their own, that content. And I think brands really need to discover what part of their vast elements are indeed ownable, and it can be something that you totally did not expect. It could be the logo, it could be maybe the mascot. Or maybe it could be a characteristic about the product that people relate to. I think that's what Oreo cookies did when they allowed people to make their own version of the Oreo cookie. You also have to be both open and controlled in terms of how you crowdsource. Allow a consumer to participate in the generation of content. So of course you have to be open. But you can't be just too unrestricted in how that's done. And legend has it that Psy crowdsourced the dancing, but I'm sure he was very strict in just using the kind of dancing that was consistent with the vision of both the dance and the video. So crowdsourcing, I think, can have this dual characteristic that it can help you, but unrestrictedly, it can hurt you as well. So make sure that it's the former and not the latter. And finally, I think, especially in the case of Gangnam Style, what led to its success was that he found this common denominator across cultures. It wasn't just limited to his home country of South Korea, but that it resonated in other countries as well. And whereas most brands try to be this hip cool brand, the problem with that is that all brands try to be hip and cool. Whereas in the case of Psy, I think he was this common Joe that anyone can relate to. He was authentic. Moreover, he was iconoclastic and he was fun and he was sincere. So again, these are characteristic, these are traits that we commonly relate to people, but even as a brand, if we can incorporate these traits, then I think we can connect with people more, faster. Okay, so I talked about memes. And so with memes, we have to weigh the benefits and costs. And so if we're doing memetic marketing we want to make sure that the benefits outweigh the cost. But if the other situation is true where the costs outweigh the benefits, maybe you're better off not using memetic marketing. So again, there are many benefits to speak of, that it's easy to create, it's simple to share. It's often very funny, it's very fast in generating this positive response. And it could be used to complement whatever marketing tool you are already using, such as conventional ATL media. But, that said, as we can see, there are many problems to speak of, first and foremost that you can be sued. So there can be intellectual property issues. It can maybe have a very poor fit if you're targeting an older demographic, and the meme that you're using resonates much more with younger people. There is this mismatch in terms of the Noon Nopi. There could be a lack of POD (point of difference) if you're doing just the same old, same old. It's fast, but it can be fast in a very negative way. There could be a backlash, which people hear about. And lastly, this backlash can be very visible, especially if it's something that's being talked about on the Internet, even on conventional media. So again, be very careful when you think about using memetic marketing. So the takeaways for this segment is that viral marketing is actually not new. It's old as mankind. But what's made it more viral, what's made it spread faster, is that now we have a online, viral market. And we learned here that viral marketing can be actually strategized. It can be promoted by incorporating more proactive elements. But we have to make sure that we weigh the pros and cons of memetic marketing. And make sure that the prosoutweigh the cons.
