What does a virus have to do with marketing? Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions. Off the Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as “word-of-mouth“, “creating a buzz“, “leveraging the media“, “network marketing“. But on the Internet, for better or worse, it’s called “viral marketing“.




