O marketing viral é mais uma tendência nas estratégias de comunicação das marcas que tem sido largamente empregue nas mais variadíssimas campanhas. Grandes são os exemplos de sucesso: quem não se recorda da campanha pela Beleza Real da Dove ou a campanha promocional do mais recente filme do Batman, The Dark Knight?
Quando o marketing viral não vem acompanhado de sucesso põem-se em causa a eficácia da campanha mas nunca do método em si. Uma notícia publicada no dia de hoje no bizreport.com indica que um recente estudo conduzido pelo Social Computing Lab da HP pode sugerir o contrário:
New research from HP Labs suggests viral marketing isn’t as quite as potent as everyone seems to think it is and people aren’t as social as they think they are.
Research findings from HP’s Social Computing Lab suggests that consumer recommendations and viral marketing might not be quite as effective as many think and that results were often unimpressive.
The propensity of a consumer to make a purchase does rise with the number of recommendations on offer, found HP’s research, but only at first. The likelihood soon plateaus, they found, and as the number of recommendations increase they become watered down and less extreme in their opinions and potentially of less persuasive value.
The report authors also threw doubt on the value of viral marketing, suggesting the reason for many failed viral marketing campaigns is partly due to the scope and breadth of a person’s circle of friends being over-estimated and usually limited to two or three subgroups.
In a punchy retort, Lee Raito of LeeRaito.com claims, “Viral marketing is not dead, nor will it ever be”, adding that all HP has achieved is to give marketers with failed viral campaigns under their belt an excuse for what was probably just a badly executed campaign.
