Marketing Strategies and Thier Conceptions

Firms are now structuring their businesses in a way that allows them to grow like a virus and lock out the existing brick and mortar competitors through innovative pricing and exploitation of competitors’ distribution channels. The beauty of this marketing technique is that none of it requires any marketing. Customers, who have caught the virus, do the selling. Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.
Off the Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as “word-of-mouth”, “creating a buzz”, “leveraging the media” and even “network marketing.” It’s a deceptively simple concept: Create a message, send it via e-mail, and make it so compelling that recipients want to pass it on to everyone in their address book. Advertisers are hot on the tactic, and the idea of putting consumers to work spreading the word about a brand or service seems sound.
What is unique about the concept is that where brands or brand ideas are exchanged within communities, they are idea-led, not advertising-led. There are some high-profile viral success stories. Like Hotmail. By simply sending an e-mail, consumers hawked the service because every message contained a Hotmail ad that helped it grow to 12 million accounts in its first year, way back in 1996. The 1999-hit film ‘The Blair Witch Project’ also benefited from a similar contagion. On web sites and in chat rooms, the film’s promoters hinted that the fictional tale was really a documentary and let the bug run wild. In most cases, the consumers were bitten.

When Garnier launched its Fructis shampoo, they latched on to the idea. The firm had to introduce the aspect of five times stronger hair and the firm had a braid competition whereby consumers could register on a...