Viral block

A recent study (1) has raised some questions on status-quo marketing campaigns, largely based on old ideas. In a world of increasing diversity in channels of communications, standardized practices of creating content once and replicating that across multiple segments and channels are unlikely to succeed. Business schools and old school marketing and advertising agencies have been lost in time as they continue on well trodden paths with limited success.

For starters, information content matters more in today's world than before and how different people understand and respond to content differ. Additionally, both the effect and understandability of content change with time as they are impacted by information from other avenues. So, any campaign that creates stagnant content and spreads that without consideration for diversity in space and time, will fail.The ability of an idea to go viral, thus, substantially depends on the ability to communicate customized and timely information. Size does not matter, in this context, and scope and relevance do.

It also appears that the internet behemoths have conditioned businesses to think about virality as a binary outcome. This is a favorable situation for those companies deriving significant revenue from advertising scale. By educating their customers that size matters, they have become highly successful companies. But such success may be short lived as more businesses begin to realize that throwing money at the problem is not the best way.

It is time to think differently. The first step may be to realize that companies are dealing with more sophisticated consumers, who do not buy products only because companies flood every channel with irrelevant information about their own products.

(1) Share and share alike. Published: Thursday, March 8, 2012 - 17:36 in Mathematics & Economics. Source: Inderscience Publishers