Abstract
A prior study showed that mobile viral marketing is an important issue of mobile marketing. Using a multicase study research approach, we introduce a typology of four standard types of mobile viral marketing and extract eight success factors for this new form of marketing. As a final step, we structure the relationship between both, showing success factors’ significance in different standard types and deriving a success factor framework. We conclude with a consideration of research implications.
1. Introduction
In a prior study almost 70 per cent of 44 mobile marketing experts stated that mobile viral marketing is an important issue of mobile marketing. The respondents confirmed that personal messages sent by friends gain more credibility than those coming directly from the self-interested advertiser. In addition, people who get the initial message from a familiar recommender participate more frequently in a campaign as initial contacts. [28] Hence, viral elements help to expand significantly the number of recipients and increase the impact of the campaign at low company expense. Like its counterpart on the stationary Internet, termed in this paper as electronic viral marketing, mobile viral marketing is based on word-of-mouth (WOM) and can be understood as a distribution and communication concept [10]. The term “viral marketing” uses the exponential diffusion of an epidemic as a metaphor for the exponential diffusion of information about products or of the products themselves by “infected” individuals [10] in this type of mobile marketing. Since an epidemic may be local and can be global the metaphor may be used regardless of the scale of diffusion which is achieved with a mobile viral marketing strategy.
