Blog Post #10 - Viral Marketing

I’ve always hated viral marketing, as I feel like the practice of it is all about trying to make me forget that the company does not have my best interest at heart. In reality, no matter who they are, they just want to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible, which is something that I try to never forget. However, I can’t deny that it definitely works sometimes, as I can’t say that I haven’t been pulled in by a particularly effective ad campaign. Viral marketing relies on the average consumer being “susceptible” to advertisement, essentially implying that the average person doesn’t think critically enough to realize they’re being led to purchase a product they probably don’t need. I believe this is why viral marketing rarely works on a large scale, as people are always becoming more and more skeptical of big corporations and their advertising schemes. The only way that it can really work, as the Wikipedia page states, is if the advertiser can actually manage to relate to the people they want to purchase their product. The many ways that companies go about figuring out how to get into the heads of their customers, which are highlighted in this page, are extremely alarming to me. The fact that they want so badly to sell their items and will go to extreme lengths, even tracking search engine and phone activity, to employ potentially successful marketing techniques freaks me out if I’m being honest, and the way that viral marketing sets out to confuse and tell lies to the general population feels pretty evil to me.