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f mouth; however, it is particularly common being use on the Internet, where messages can be spread easily and quickly to reach people all over the world. Products can become very famous in this way with very little advertising cost.
Carrabis (2006) has proved that viral marketing rely on social networks in order to function. Linking is also an effective viral marketing tool, as is the provision of free products or services. The Hotmail free e-mail service, for example, grew quickly with little marketing investment (Tafe, 2007).
In B2B area, viral marketing works well in the following circumstances: (a) when a product is genuinely new and different, and it is something that opinion leaders want to associate with;(b) when the benefits of the product are real; (c) when the product is relevant to a large number of people, and the benefits are easy to communicate (Bansal and Voyer, 2000, p26-63).
2.6 Why Viral Marketing
These years, online social networks are increasingly being considered as an important source of information to affect the adoption and use of products and services (Mac, 2006). Viral marketing as the tactic of creating a process where interested people can market to each other, is therefore emerging as an important marketing strategy to spread-the-word and stimulate the trial, adoption, and use of products and services. (Herr, Kardes and Kim, 1999)
What is new about viral marketing is not word of mouth, but the way people are spreading it (Hogan, Lemon and Libai, 2004). Web users have the ears and eyes of hundreds, even thousands of people. They are in contact with an International crowd they would never have met otherwise. Most significantly, they can reach people they do not really know. That is why several weeks after a people sent the first Hotmail message into India; thousands of Indian users had Hotmail accounts (Kuruvilla, 2007).
It is believed that a satisfied customer tells an average of three people about a product or service he likes, and nine people about a product or service which he dislikes (Sudaraman, Mitra and Webster, 1999). Viral marketing is based on this natural human behavior to conduct its campaigns.
Domingos (2006) believed that the purpose of marketers interested in making a successful viral marketing campaign is to identify customers who with high social networking potentials, and then created viral messages that can attract this segment of the customers and have a high likely to keep the message spreading.
Viral marketing has received extensive attention from both academics and practitioners these years (Jurvetson, 2000). Base on the analysis before, many authors form their standpoints about the effect that viral marketing strategy can bring to a company. They argue with other authors’ opinions base on their own standpoints.
2.6.1 Positive Effects of Viral Marketing
Viral marketing facilitates spreading commercial information and content within the desired target group (Hogan, Lemon and Libai, 2001)). Another advantage of it is that advertisers can expand the promotion reach significantly at a very low company expense (Baker, 2005). According a survey of Duhan, Johnson, Wilcox and Harrell (1997), 35% of the 3000 respondents said a friend’s recommendation would convince them to visit a website they do not know before. These results illustrated the huge potential of viral marketing for communication and distributio本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。