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Examples of successful viral marketing campaigns represent critical social media advertising myths. Often repeated exemplars include "The Big Ad" (Australian brewer Carlton United), "Subservient Chicken" (Burger King), DollarShave.com , "The Campaign for Real Beauty" (Dove), "DOthertest.co.uk" (London Transport Authority), and "The Cog" (Honda) among numerous others. As industry myths, stories of these campaigns reinforce the notion that viral marketing, and social media campaigns more generally, represent a powerful means to achieve brand-related objectives - the wide reach (awareness) and rapid penetration (particularly among a target market) are offered as explanations for increased financial investment. The following examples typify much of the reporting surrounding viral marketing.
Old Spice's The Man Your Man Can Smell Like was viewed "16 million times in the five months following the first airing" (Mills, 2012, p. 165), increasing to almost 96 million views and was ranked as the most viral brand of the year in 2011 (Keller and Fay, 2012). Old Spice realised a sales increase of 107 per cent in July 2010 for just the body wash product (O'Leary and Waserman, 2010). Honda's two-minute Cog video saw a quadrupling of hits to the brand's US web site and was believed responsible for record first-quarter sales in 2004 (Dobele et al. , 2005).
Viral marketing (defined as "the act of propagating marketing messages through the help and cooperation from individual consumers" Liu-Thompkins, 2012, p. 59) is believed to offer many benefits, including better targeting, faster diffusion, enhanced message credibility, and lower cost (Dobele et al. , 2005). As a result, marketers are rapidly investing in social media enhanced word-of-mouth (Kaske et al. , 2012). By the end of 2013, predicted spending on electronic word-of-mouth is estimated to reach $3 billion in the USA alone (Kozinets et al. , 2010). The strength of viral marketing is believed to emanate from harnessing consumer networks whereby peers pass on messages to peers. As such, viral marketing relies on "active and engaged" consumers to co-create campaign success (Harris and Rae, 2009, p. 26).
Although viral marketing has much potential to engage consumers and create conversations around the brand among a large audience, our understanding of what motivates the exchange of information has been questioned (e.g. Higham, 2000; Schmitt et al. , 2011; Trusov et al.