Viral Marketing is a marketing strategy that spreads out to the customers like a virus through social media. It includes movies, videos, and postings based on a business’ brand story. When people see an advertisement, they seek its products and spread the products to their friends. These days, the way of marketing which is giving information to customers naturally, raising the business’ credibility and stimulating purchase needs, is common. The users who actively participate in not only revealing the contents itself, through SNS and on blogs, but also making new content are the main proponents in the marketing field. Viral Marketing is targeting to the majority of people like other media advertisements, but its outstanding trait is selected exposure, not unliteral exposure to the public. Compared to Keyword and Banner Advertisement, the effects of Viral Marketing are through a blog’s clipping function, so there is a high advertisement impact. In Korea, Viral Marketing is effective because it gets the customer’s attention by analyzing search words, popular goods and rival goods.

The Positive Aspects of Viral Marketing

Ascending the value of a brand

Yanadoo, an online English course, has become the No.1 brand through a notable advertisement strategy. It was the No.2 brand in English online academies, however, it continuously targets a *niche market and tries to be differentiated from other companies. Firstly, they used social media advertisements and gradually expanded their influence through Facebook and Naver Band. Next, Yanadoo established a strategic alliance with T-mon and participated in home shopping to increase sales. Through this way, it can advertise its services with a small outlay. Besides, it makes clear that its goal is the learner’s success in English. To accomplish its goal, it provides free contents to learn English and feedback to correct pronunciation. Using Youtube, Yanadoo has shown someone’s development in English by doing 15 minutes of an English presentation project. These ways are unprecedented services in that field, so these aspects make Yanadoo stand out. Unlike their rivals, it cast an actor model and increased the immersion level of viewers by close-up and rapid image change, so it can construct a positive brand’s image, gaining popularity on SNS. After the success of Yanadoo’s advertisement, most of the online language courses have been introducing this style of advertisement.

*niche market: the subset of the market on which a specific product is focused.

Market Expansion

Market Kurly is a specialized premium food company founded in 2014, and it became a representative online food curation mall due to its intriguing services. It sells foreign groceries, convenience food and so on. It uses a ‘Cold-chain System’, which maintain a constant price from warehousing of goods to delivery, to supply fresh groceries at a reasonable price. In addition to this, it will deliver ordered products before 7 a.m the next day, if the customer orders before 11 p.m. the previous day. Its services are popular among people, especially housewives, through its homepage, Facebook, Instagram, and Naver Cafe. It also gains a viral effect by using various magazine channels to establish a premium image and introducing recipes through the Internet and magazines to gain attention from customers. Moreover, Kurlyadopters, who are regular customers, actively promote its goods, which brings a huge impact on Instagram. Recently, it cast Jun Ji-hyun to do aggressive marketing. As the actress gives a feeling of exclusivity, Kurly could get a strong and great brand image. Kurly’s popularity changes the market’s ecosystem in the grocery delivery field. Other companies like E-mart and Co+upang followed Kurly’s marketing strategies by introducing rapid delivery, dawn delivery and various advertisements. This became a new trend in society.

A Negative Aspect of Viral Marketing

Panic buying in the music industry

One area that has caused suspicion in Korea society, regarding viral marketing is in the music industry. Chart manipulation means brokers receive money from the client and stream the same music by using other people’s accounts to forge the music chart. The reason many singers do this is that they can earn a lot of money by preserving their songs’ position on the music chart. If a song is highly ranked on the charts, many people can easily come across that song. Manipulation is hard to prevent because the streaming site can’t check every illegal account one by one. Eventually, investigative agencies have to investigate according to the detailed statement the entertainment agencies give. This whole process is too time consuming to handle the current situation because so many singers are suspected of manipulating the music chart. This suspicion is not a unbelievable one as most suspected singers and their songs are not that famous unlike their charts’ rank. Those singers insist that their songs become popular as they do viral marketing successfully. They consistently say that their songs go viral through Facebook and Youtube, as people who use those sites frequently listen and become fans of their songs. But the public doesn’t believe their claims because they didn’t hear their songs and the trend curves on music sites are very strange to explain their popularity. People think that those singers are using the viral marketing’s traits and public, to explain their popularity. Their claims can’t be explained by viral marketing, but these cases make people regard viral marketing as a negative thing.

Abuse Viral

In Korea, abusing viral marketing has been caught and punished several times. Last year, “Company A’s” PR agency posted malicious comments on a rivals’ products, and it was under police’s investigation. It posted comments such as ‘This product makes my child ill’, ‘It is an illegal product that is not permitted to be sold,’ and so on. Korea does not allow such conduct, so “Company A’s” behavior was recognized as an offense of obstructing operations.

According to a survey ‘The Present Condition of SNS and Social Meaning Inside and Outside of the Country’ by the Korea Information Society and Development Institute’, the reasons people disconnect from their relationship in Twitter are related to viral marketing.

• Too many tweets (34.6%)
• The account itself has a specific intention (28.3%)
• The account suggests too much unfounded information (14.2%)

  ---approximately 77%

  People can know that unfounded information, which has a purpose and appears frequently repulses people. Viral abuse is a serious social problem that can damage not only the enterprises who do the marketing but also the customers.

  Online Marketing is a very influential and effective way of advertising. In this situation, the companies which figure out how to use wisely are on a roll, but indiscriminate advertisements enormously harm customers and blur our judgement. It is important for customers to raise their ability to judge the advertisement. But a more important lesson is that: enterprises need to make unique and attractive advertisements to gain popular appeal, rather than just focus on producing aggressive advertising that ‘turn off’ potential customers.

Han Suji  suzyhan96@gmail.com

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