Top Five Creative Viral Campaigns

Here are my top 5 viral campaigns that have generated significant word of mouth exposure for their brands due to being highly creative.

Kit Kat And Jesus 

Probably one of the most creative viral campaigns that ticks all the boxes.  

In 2009 there were three separate sightings of Jesus that occurred throughout Europe. Kit Kat picked up on this and planned to leverage this phenomenon by planning their own Jesus sighting.  A day before Easter in 2010 Kit Kat sent an email to the two largest Dutch news sites from a fictitious person, who claimed to have seen the face of Jesus in his Kit Kat, after taking a bite. As proof of his story he attached two pictures. The Dutch news site published the story immediately. After four days more than 150.000 sites published the story.  This then promoted a wave of word of mouth social media comments that promoted the brand, such as’ ‘have a break, have a Jesus Kit Kat’, even JC needs a break’.

Oreo At The Super Bowl 

Oreo's social media team worked quickly during the third quarter of the 2013 Super Bowl when a power outage at the Raven’s versus 49ers game at the Superdome caused the lights to go out for 34minutes. 

Wasting no time and thinking creatively they jumped into action and tweeted an ad with this caption “You Can Still Dunk In The Dark?"

Since then, it’s been retweeted more than 14,000 times and Facebook has received more than 20,000 likes. This a hugely powerful bit of marketing not only because of the brand equity it built, but because it occurred during the advertising industry’s most expensive day – all for free. 

Lipton Milk Tea And Chinese New Year

This campaign is a great example of what happens with something goes viral in China.  In  2010 to celebrate Chinese New Year, AKQA and Lipton Milk Tea created a viral campaign that they launched on China’s biggest IM and social networking site QQ.

The campaign featured a website where people would select one of three videos (shot in first person) they were able to personalise their selected video and then send to a friend along with adding a special Chinese New Year greeting. The message was received in a red box which made is even more special when the recipient opened the online message.  When opened the box revealed a hot steaming cup of Lipton Milk Tea that then revealed a special message. The results were enormous with over 100 million people sending or watching the videos.  Shows what you can do with a bit of creativity and deep customer insight!

Vail Ski Resort And EpicMix

Vail Resort wanted to combine the outdoor lifestyle experience of skiing with social networking.  They did this through launching EpicMix, a one-of-a-kind online and mobile app that connected skiers with their friends and family on the mountain, allowing them to share stories, pictures and their achievements while they were out for the day skiing.

EpicMix enabled to generate strong word of mouth for Vail Resort in three ways. RFID technology embedded into the season passes and lift passes allowed passive check-ins so riders could learn about their skiing travels, i.e.  how many vertical feet they travelled, how far and where they actually travelled. Second, by allowing riders to earn 'pins' for a variety of achievements, EpicMix became a game that motivated and challenged riders in a fun and interactive way. Finally EpicMix being a free web and mobile application enabled riders to share their days experiences and photos easily.  Users could log on or use a smartphone to access their account, see their status, add friends from Facebook, create an EpicMix family, send messages and see where friends or family was on the mountain.

EpicMix went live in December 2010 and since then over 100,000 guests have activated an account.  As well EpicMix has generated more than 35million social impressions.

Age-o-matic campaign

Online games work to build strong brand impressions. The Age-o-matic campaign was created by CareerBuilder to show people how staying in the wrong job would age them.  They created a clever tool called ‘The Age-o-Matic” and launched it virally - targeting people who hated their jobs. 

The Age-o-matic online game invited people to upload a photo and then asked them to answer a number of questions to highlight how much they hated their job.  The Age-o-matic aged the picture to show how that person would look if they stayed in their job.

The online game cost US$200,000 to build and nothing to promote it as it was promoted all through word of mouth online activity.  It garnered 50 million media impressions in one month and enjoyed 2 million unique visitors, who spend 4 minutes on average with the tool.

Coming next

How to avoid negative word of mouth

Ten Tips For Word-Of-Mouth Success

Can you influence people talking about you?

Top ten tips to drive word-of-mouth success

1. Listen and learn:  If you are about to launch a new product, work with a small group of followers to develop your product further. Listen and learn from them to perfect your product prior to its launch.
2. Be interesting, by being interested:  Take an active interest in your customers - get to know them.  Deepen your understanding by getting your ear to the ground, so to speak, and listening to the conversations that they are having about you and your competitors. 
3. Act:   Develop customer-orientated initiatives. Engage your customers by getting them to actively involved in co-creating their own product features. Build a personalised customer experience - that reflects your brand identity and touches as many senses as possible.  Try not to be contrived. Your initiatives’ must look genuine.
   
4. Test your environment: Only launch your product when the environment is right.  Don’t just say ‘she’ll be right’ and hope for the best. Launch your product on a small scale and if it doesn't work as yourselves - is the environment right for us to launch this now.
5. Be creative:  Creativity is vital for creating a buzz.  Marketing is all about creativity so think out-side-the-box and do something that’s a little left field.  With 20% of brand conversations influenced by advertising (Keller, 2007) and social media platforms at your fingertips there is no excuse not too. 
   
6. Protect your brand’s credibility: Understand your brand and think carefully about the consequences and risks of launching your campaign.  Develop a robust post campaign plan to mitigate risks to your brand.  Remember you are never fully in control of word of mouth – therefore being disciplined about developing post launch plans is key for you to stay in control. 
7. Develop the right message and media strategy: Think about where your product is in its lifecycle and who's your customer.   
   
   If you are launching a new product or service target the message to ‘early adopters’ and appeal to their need for scarcity. Develop a media strategy that keeps your product discrete and exclusive. If your product is targeting the ‘early majority’, focus your message on social proofing, i.e. ‘join the thousands who are now enjoying this great new product’. Develop a media strategy that generates mass exposure, i.e. high reach through a creative viral campaign, facebook (likes) or maybe mass media if you have the budget.
8. Keep your brand visible:  People mostly talk about mundane things, so keeping your brand ‘top of mind’ will keep you in their topic of conversation.
   
9. Start thinking conversations:  Change your mindset and stop thinking campaigns and start talking conversations.
10. Understand ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘where’.  Understand who can influence your customers and then build team of influencers that are trusted by your customers. Understand what is important to your customer. For word of mouth to have an impact the message must address a person’s core functional needs. Where - develop networks that your customers trust - messages that are circulated within trusted networks have less reach but greater impact than those circulated through a dispersed community.
11. Measure & evaluate:  Word of mouth is not often thought about in marketing plans let alone measured and evaluated.  Develop a way to measure your word of mouth activity so you can evaluate its success and learn which activities have a better ROI than others. By looking at volume and then impact, either negative or positive you can start to measure the effects of word of mouth messages more accurately.  Then you can start to assess which campaigns are having a greater, more positive impact than others.  This will provide you with a wealth of information that will improve your word of mouth performance over-time. 

The above exhibit is an adaptation of the McKinsey’s word of mouth equity framework.

"The rewards of pursuing excellence in word of mouth marketing are huge, and it can deliver a sustainable and significant competitive edge few other marketing approaches can match" (McKinsey, 2010). 

Harness The Power of Word-of-Mouth Marketing

We all do it…. develop elaborate marketing plans that allocate thousands or millions of dollars to integrated promotional activities and forget about the one thing that is FREE and the biggest factor that influences product purchases – word of mouth marketing.

I’ll explain how marketers can use it to influence consumer behaviour to increase your competitive advantage.  These insights have been extracted from ‘A new way to measure word-of-mouth marketing’ by Bughin, Doogan and Vetvik, (2010). 

According to research WOM is the primary factor behind 20 to 50 percent of all purchase decisions. Research also shows ‘influencers’ typically generate three times more WOM impact on recipients purchasing decision; with around 1% of ‘influencers’ using digital avenues, the most notably being bloggers.

The below chart shows how WOM influences consumers at any stage of their decision journey. Compounding this is the digital revolution, which has taken WOM conversation to a new level of power.

To understand how you can use word of mouth to influence consumers you have to understand the primary drivers.

Driver 1 - volume of recommendations

The volume of word of mouth recommendations seems a relatively obvious driver of consumer behaviour - the more recommendations the better for your brand or product. But, volume really only works when the right person is sending the word of mouth message.

Driver 2 – who is making the recommendation (who)

Who the sender of the WOM message plays a big part in influencing a WOM receiver’s purchase decision.  The greater the WOM receiver trusts or believes the WOM influencer has competence in the area they are talking about, the more powerful the WOM message is on influencing their purchase decision.  

Driver 3 – the message content (what)

What the influencer says is a primary driver of the impact of word of mouth.  Research shows that the content of the message must address important product or service features if it is to influence consumer decision. Whilst advertising is often built around an emotional positioning, for WOM to have an impact the messages must address core functional needs.

Driver 4 – the network where they are talking (where)

Messages that are circulated within trusted networks have less reach but greater impact than those circulated through a dispersed community. This is why ‘old-fashioned’ kitchen table recommendations or online communities remain so important.

Harness word-of-mouth to beat your competition.

With very few companies actively managing word of mouth marketing, developing a WOM plan has the potential to deliver a sustainable and significant competitive advantage.

Here is a guide to help your business give you a competitive advantage using WOM.

Step 1 – understand which drivers (who, what or where) of word of mouth are most important to your product category. For example for health insurance category ‘who’ is most important and the skin care category it is the ‘what’. 

Step 2 - Once you understand what type of driver is the most important then you can tailor positive word of mouth in these three ways.

Experiential – is the most common and powerful form of word of mouth – it’s the experience somebody has (either positive or negative) that generates a story. Harnessing experiential word of mouth is fundamentally facilitating opportunities where people can share their positive experiences.  Things you can do to increase experiential word of mouth.

• build a buzz around a product prior to it launching
• engage ‘influences’ (that have trust and competence within your category) to blog about your product
• consistently refresh the functional product features and relaunch them using online chat forums and blogs.

To create positive word of mouth that generates a buzz the customer experience must exceed customer’s expectations on the dimensions that matter most to them – so they then feel inclined to talk about it.  

“To turn customers into an effective marketing vehicle, companies need to out perform on product and service attributes that have intrinsic word of mouth potential,” say Bughin et al.

Consequential – is the word of mouth generated from the company generated marketing activities.  This requires marketing to monitor the effects of marketing activities and the word of mouth it generates. Research shows that marketing-induced consumer-to-consumer word of mouth generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising. For low innovation categories – adopting ‘highly creative tactics’ greatly facilitates word of mouth.

This chair by Nike is a great example of developing a highly creative tactic to get people talking about their brand.

Intentional – is marketing activities driven from celebrity endorsements or key influencers who become brand or product advocates. Red Bull is a company that deploys this activity well. This below video of their sponsorship of the Wake Open Ambassador Day is a great example.  They identify key influential’s amongst different target segments and then ensures that celebrities and other opinion makers see the right messages among consumers, often through their sponsored events.

Bughin J., Doogan J., Vetvik O., (2010), ‘A new way to measure word-of-mouth marketing’, McKinsey Quarterly April 2010

What the HELL is social media - in 2 minutes

Stop thinking 'campaigns' and start thinking 'conversations'. Social media is a great platform to get the conversation started.