Article
Viral marketing
Viral marketing is inexpensive, fun and cutting edge, but measuring its success can be difficult.
August 26, 2007
* This article is from the Aug./Sept. 2007 issue of Fast Casual magazine. Click here to subscribe.
Moe's Southwest Grill always has been a playful brand. So when it launched its "Burrito in Every Hand" viral marketing campaign last year, the promotion was expected to be fun.
The effort saw Moe's encourage customers to tape 30-second videos proclaiming their love for its burritos and then post them on a micro-Web site (a smaller companion to the main Web site) where they could be viewed and voted on by peers.
"Moe's was built on grassroots marketing like that," said Sara Riggsby, Moe's senior director of marketing. "We have a bit of a cult following for our burritos, so we trusted customers to talk about why they think they're great. We knew they'd find a fun way to do that."
Four amateur rappers/filmmakers known as "Notorious M.O.E. and Nacho Daddy" won the top prize of burritos for life with their campy and funny production (see http://moes.sharkle.com/video/959/). The video garnered some 11,000 page views, a mere sliver of the 211,000 total visits to the promotion's micro-site.
"It makes it catchy, like a jingle, when you have something cheesy like that video," Riggsby said. "It was right up our alley and I think that's why it was so popular."
Such is the essence of modern viral marketing, where the Web's best elements — affordability, broad reach and instant transmission — are coordinated to encourage users to spread a company's message voluntarily.
Prime targets
Targeted e-mails sent to existing customer databases have served as viral marketing's primary escort for the past decade, but videos quickly are becoming the medium of choice. Posted on social Web sites such as YouTube and MySpace, videos are available for all to see and comment on, and, more importantly, to link to other potential viewers through e-mail.
Unlike word-of-mouth marketing, which is spread in a slower but similarly viral way, electronic viral marketing can infect a multitude of users in seconds, depending on to whom the viewer chooses to send it, and how often.
But viral marketing can be a tad risky in a day when millions of Internet bloggers eagerly weigh in with criticism; however, when bloggers like what they see, their sites often become digital springboards to mass-media attention.
David Meerman Scott, author of "The New Rules of Marketing and PR," said he'd never seen the legendary Carl's Jr. $6 Burger viral video (featuring a shiny-wet Paris Hilton slithering atop a car hood while eating the burger) until he learned about it through major news coverage.
"Now all of sudden mainstream media was talking about it and made it famous. And that's where viral can be the most successful," Scott said. "Sometimes using something strange or controversial in order to get media exposure can be worth trying."
Scott pointed to viral campaigns run by online casino Golden Palace as media magnets.
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Restaurants such as Chipotle have launched successful viral marketing campaigns. |
"They buy really weird things on eBay," Scott said. "When they bought William Shatner's kidney stone for $25,000, everybody laughed at them. But when every magazine and TV news program started talking about it, they got millions of dollars in free advertising because they talked about Golden Palace. It generated a ton of buzz, which is the goal of viral marketing."
Out with tradition
Unlike traditional advertising, the goal of viral isn't always to sell products. Companies using it want to increase brand awareness by leading receivers to interact with and enjoy the brand. In other words, Moe's fans didn't have to buy burritos, they merely were invited to sing their praises in a fun way.
For decades, marketers have insisted promotional messages be controlled, targeted, customer-focused and measurable. But with the growth of the Internet, such tight message management is diminished.
"With viral, you don't have ultimate control over a campaign's success," said David Craven, marketing manager for Qdoba Mexican Grill.
Last year, the company launched a "Who Do you Love?" viral campaign in which it asked customers to nominate their heroes for an "ultimate party." The winner, chosen from 1,500 submissions, got a Qdoba-catered harbor-boat cruise for 150 of his closest friends.
Releasing control, Craven added, means taking some risks, too.
"Professional marketers have been ingrained to control the message, the medium and the outcome," he said. "But what we're learning with the proliferation of the online space is you lose control when you go out there. Whether it's a blogger saying something or you're asking for submission such as some type of video — and you're going to get some back that are downright crude — you have to be prepared for that."
Scott agreed, saying if a viral campaign is poorly received, negative opinions and publicity can spread like wildfire in the blogosphere.
Wal-Mart learned that lesson the hard way after the launch of "Walmarting Across America," a supposed happy-customer-generated blog praising service experiences at its stores. When it was discovered later that the blog was generated by Edelman, Wal-Mart's PR agency of record, bloggers dubbed it a "flog" — a fake blog — and harshly criticized the company on the Web.
Honesty is a must in viral marketing, Scott said.
"There have been a number of examples of companies posting a stealth video on YouTube and making it seem like it was produced by a customer," he said. "People love catching that stuff, and when they do, the bloggers will write about it."
Ironically, unlike traditional advertising, the homemade look of viral campaigns is part of their charm and attraction. Scott said the hallmark of many good viral videos is their lack of slick production. Spending loads ofmoney "looks like a commercial and people can be turned off. The market will tear you up if you come across as overly polished."
When Planet Smoothie launched its Adventures of Cupman viral campaign, the goal was simple: "We wanted to say that Planet Smoothie is a fun brand, a hip brand and an exciting brand," said Chris McCracken, vice president and brand leader at the 140-unit chain. "We also wanted to say, subtly, that ours is a healthy alternative to what's out there and that we're environmentally friendly. We wanted simply to appeal to our demographic."
That's a huge responsibility given a character that is half man, half cup who struggles to find his way in society. So to achieve that, they made Cupman's adventures funny, McCracken said.
"After doing extensive research, we found the most successful campaign makes people laugh, so we intended to be goofy," he said. "Most traditional campaigns are so serious, so we thought, instead of intimidating them, let's make them feel comfortable about us."
But does it sell?
While viral marketing is fun and popular, no one truly knows whether it actually drives sales.
Viral marketing practitioners trust that encouraging customers to have fun through interaction with the brand will lead them to buy. The governing sentiment is: If they like us, they'll trust us, and if they trust us, they'll try us.
Few in the restaurant segment have run viral campaigns better than quick-service chains such as Domino's Pizza and Pizza Hut. Earlier this year, both companies "seeded" social Web sites like YouTube with videos tied to their companies.
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Domino's "Mackenzie Gets What Mackenzie Wants" video series centered on a spoiled rich girl who sold her new Saab on eBay for $9.99 because her father bought the wrong color. (Not coincidentally, $9.99 is the same tab as the chain's Anything Goes pizza-topping promotion running at that time.) Customers were led to a micro-site where they picked up clues to find Mackenzie's Saab for sale, as well as other items such as laptop computers.
Pizza Hut seeded MySpace with video tales of "Ted, America's Most-Loved Pizza Delivery Guy," wherein the protagonist endures humorous on-the-job challenges. After several weeks' exposure to Ted's mixed tales of woe and whimsy, the company kicked off a campaign to find America's Favorite Pizza Fan, a $25,000 contest introduced by the now-familiar delivery guy.
"We want to be a brand people want to spend time with," said Domino's vice president of brand marketing, Trish Drueke, adding that the Mackenzie series drew 3 million views. "Whether they're ... downloading ring tones or following the treasure hunt on eBay, they're spending time with our brand. And at the end of the day, that's how we measure its success."
Unlike viral campaigns run by Chipotle Mexican Grill, Planet Smoothie and Moe's, Pizza Hut and Domino's offered incentives to "come play with us" and tied their overall messages to statements about the company or available product deals. Scott, however, believes the most successful viral campaigns are incentive-free and promote only goodwill between brands and buyers.
"The classic example right now is to enter a contest and win an iPod," he said. "If that drives participation, the temptation is to think the campaign worked because people signed up. But most often it's because they're interested in an iPod, not in that restaurant's hamburgers."
In every viral campaign, he said, the primary goal is to get people talking about your brand."What's great about viral campaigns are that they're so inexpensive."
If sales don't increase, "no harm, no foul, really, because you didn't spend much." Compared to traditional media plans, "that's a big difference if you don't get a return on a major investment."
McCracken said Planet Smoothie knew Cupman was a success when the phones started ringing.
"We measured it by in-store feedback. The phones were literally ringing off the hook with positive feedback that we were making an eco-friendly push," he said. "And, yes, we do see sales up as a result."
On target
For all its traditional rule-breaking, experts insist viral marketing must target a restaurant's core user. In the case of the fast-casual chains mentioned here, the Gen-X demographic of 25- to 45- year-olds and the Gen-Y demographic of 15- to 30- year-olds, with an emphasis on males, was nearly a constant.
Not only was the subject matter geared toward that demographic, companies sought to meet them where they already are, on the Net — particularly at YouTube and MySpace — and on their cell phones.
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