There is a constant effort on the part of all the marketing departments of a company to attract its customers, or perhaps attract the customers of others. This is like a war in which everything is fair and therefore the term viral marketing should not make any marketer feel insulted. There is nothing unethical about this form of marketing, in fact it has changed the way we use our resources. This is a way to make optimal use of the communication channels of recent days. Most of the time, people try to outdo each other because of the huge infrastructures they make to maintain and grow. However, this is the smartest way to talk to your consumers. The number of people you connect with with the help of this method does not increase in days, but in seconds.
I will talk about some of the most illustrious examples of this type of marketing. This is very similar to the word of mouth method that was used in ancient times to reach the masses. It was around the time of the 1960s that companies like Mary Kay and Amway started this form of advertising. They started selling their products to a few people and gave a commission to get more customers for the company. The more clients a person brought in, the more commission that person received. It was soon a way of earning money for many women. They started selling the products to their friends and thus the product gained popularity among their target users without having to work as much on it. Otherwise, they would have to identify potential users and communicate with them. In this case, the product found its users on its own. One more thing that comes as a benefit in this form of advertising is that your product becomes much more acceptable and popular than you would have thought. Consumer behavior can never be accurately dictated, and viral marketing uses this uncertainty to the marketer’s benefit.
Another very famous example of viral marketing is Hotmail. They have been the ones who brought this method to the Internet. With the help of current users of network services, they reached out to the people. His goal was to make the product acceptable to the masses. So they tagged their product information and free email services along with email sent by existing users. The one who subscribed to it became the bearer of the message. Therefore, the virus spread through all relationships and infected all circles. This is the reason why this form of marketing is so called.
Although this has been a very old way of doing marketing, the benefits have not been surpassed by any other way. Recently, networking sites are also using this form of marketing. One person, who joins the network, brings his entire company of friends to the site. Also, people use these sites to talk about themselves and their work. Therefore, those who are in contact with that person know about him and so on.