Viral marketing - Essay Example

The fundamental issue of viral marketing is natural human behavior. Developing marketing strategies, managers take into account social and personal factors, individual characteristics of a target group and their needs. Whether such carryover from business to society will be effective is another matter. Thus, viral marketing does have a stake in the welfare of this nation and it should accept its responsibilities in society and become more intimately involved with societal concerns (Bryce, 2007).

As a result, it is necessary to develop further marketing theory, facts, concepts, models, and ideas that interface with such problems. This is grist for social marketing. Unless marketing develops its social awarenesses and implements social actions that are acceptable, government will be forced to do that which marketing has not been willing to do voluntarily, thereby circumscribing the boundaries of marketing management. Following Dunn and Probstein (2003): "Viral marketing is powerful because it is the antithesis of hard sell or "shout" paid advertising.

Hotmail experienced this in the on-line buzz it received when it offered free email. Hotmail attached its URL and a brief marketing message to the bottom of every Hotmail" (10). This example illustrates habitual behavior of customers and importance of social networks and personal relations between consumers. Viral marketing allows consumers to achieve a sense of broad community, inspire personal interest and participation. Viral marketing performs its social role in two ways. First, marketing faces social challenges in the same sense as the government and other institutions.

But unlike the government, marketing finds its major social justification through offering product-service mixes and commercially unified applications of the results of technology to the marketplace for a profit. Second, it participates in welfare and cultural efforts extending beyond mere profit considerations, and these include various community services and charitable and welfare activities. For example, marketing has had a hand in the renewed support for the arts in general, the increasing demand for good books, the attendance at operas and symphony concerts, the sale of classical records, the purchase of fine paintings through mail-order catalogues, and the attention being given to meeting educational needs.

These worthy activities, while sometimes used as a social measure, do not determine the degree of social concern or the acceptance of social responsibility (Bryce, 2007).Human behavior is explained by communication and personal relations between consumers who share their likes and dislikes with each other. It is assumed that a consumer tells two or three people about the services or products he use or buy. In many cases, consumer preferences are based on word-of-mouth recommendations rather than advertising or promotion.

In reality, the improvement of material situations is a stimulus for recognition of intrinsic values, the general lifting of taste, the enhancement of a moral climate, the direction of more attention to the appreciation of arts and esthetics. History seems to confirm this; for great artistic and cultural advancements were at least accompanied by, if not directly stimulated by, periods of