Viral Marketing's Advantages and Disadvantages

Low costs, extensive reach, high credibility, high efficiency that brings a very quick impact at a relatively low cost is the key driver for marketers wishing to use viral marketing.

Viral marketing can be the remedy against today's technological devices which designed for avoiding recording TV Ads. Besides, the message used for viral marketing has less restriction than that of the traditional Ads which enable greater creativity on creating the viral messages.

However, there are also a lot of disadvantages, such as brand dilution, association with unknown groups, lack of control, limited possibility of segmentation, and spam issues.

Brand dilution is that viral marketing depends on people who are not versed in your brand to do the "selling" for you. Due to the easy and massive proliferations of messages, damage can be enormous if the message is negatively perceived. It may result in misinterpretations and distort the creator's original intent, or make the communication brandless.

Sometimes it may difficult to control. If the message is passed to someone who is not supposed to be associated with, the viral message would then be perceived as spam and lead to damage to the company's reputation and image.

Besides, marketers have to take the risk of losing their investment that if the message cannot go "viral" and stop transmitting.