Incentive viral marketing involves offering an incentive to potential viral marketers to forward a message to their friends and associates. Marketers use a range of incentives such as money, give-aways, discounts and credit to motivate the user to share and spread company information. The viral message is still forwarded by a credible source but the recipient understands there is money or some form of reward involved in the sales pitch (Beeler, 2000, p.54). Marketing messages coupled with valuable and tangible incentives is the most common and successful form of viral (Brewer, 2001).
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The success of incentive viral marketing acknowledges the notion that "free" is the most powerful word in a marketer's vocabulary, while the words "cheap" and "inexpensive" may also generate a wave of interest (Wilson, 2000). An example of an incentive message is: 'Free Guess shirt to the first 50 people who visit our store for our annual sale on July 1'.
Heyman (1999) believes the key to a successful incentive viral marketing campaign is meeting the target audience’s needs. Therefore, the incentive should not be one that will be simply rejected because it does not relate to the audience. “There's tons of companies bribing users with cash, cars, trips, etc., and most of the time these incentives won't be nearly as effective as offering something directly relevant to your audience�? (Heyman, 1999). Sony’s college promotion is a great example. At the beginning of the promotion Sony was giving away several thousand dollars but they changed their incentive to a dorm room full of electronics, worth far less than the cash. The response rate to the latter was more than double in comparison to the cash.
Wilson (2000) explained that while the idea of giving away rewards results in a loss of profit for a company in the short-term, however, the spread of a message generates general interest which in the long-term leads to interest in other desirable things the company is selling. This type of viral sheds some innuendo on the marketing maxim, "give away something, sell something" (Wilson, 2000).
Incentive viral marketing still has its downside. Firstly, it is more costly than service-based campaigns (Dahanayake, 2002), and secondly it can have the effect of spam-like distribution of the message (Brewer, 2001). The technique has been described as “delegated spam�? by the founder of viral marketing Steve Jurvetson, because it gives users a reason to forward messages (Beeler, 2000, p. 54). It has been suggested that marketers should cap the incentive to a specific quantity to avoid problems in customer service, finance and privacy, which occurs in consequence of spamming (Brewer, 2001).
Donnabel Guillermo 23:36, 12 Oct 2005 (EST)
