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Viral Marketing and the relationship with digital marketing: Viral Marketing has been increasingly linked with social media such as Facebook and YouTube over the past few decades. Rollins et al (2014) states that Viral Marketing is a marketing strategy that triggers word-of-mouth communication of consumers, especially over the Internet. Kalpaklioglu and Toros (2011) point out that this marketing strategy has become more popular since it has been realised that the usage of viral marketing is low-cost and more trustworthy with users, and can be profitable for businesses using it, compared to traditional marketing such as newspapers and television. The key factor of empowering viral marketing may be the trust effect. This strategy offers the product information, for instance the performance and the social consequences of the purchase decision (Brown, Broderick & Lee, 2007:4; Cox,1963). Rollins et al. (2014) claims that satisfying customers will reap benefits for the company from consumer-to-consumer communications. The intimate relationship between viral marketing and digital marketing shows that viral marketing can be used more frequently in today's marketing field.

The benefit of the Viral Marketing: The core value of Viral Marketing is relatively inexpensive of holding a marketing campaign in comparison to other forms of advertising channels (Dobele,et., 2005, Kaikati & Kaikati, 2004, Welker, 2002). Marketers can adopt social media as the promotion channel to create a widespread message to the customers, and the concept of viral marketing is to encourage consumers to transmit the product or company information to the people around them quickly via online communication such as Facebook. Besides, the high level of scope is also the key benefit of Viral Marketing, that can imply its potential to reach customers in a global scale during a short period of time (Thorne, 2008). The large scale reach can be accessed from a diverse audience through social media (Helm, 2000). Viral marketing not only generates profit to businesses but can also bring benefits to consumers, so that strategy can build a win-win situation. Rollins et al. (2014) points out that businesses can gain the financial benefit and consumers can get the benefit socially. Combing the strategy and Internet can be a huge impact for customers, and the message can be convey in worldwide in a miunte.

The risk or challenge of the Viral Marketing: Lack of control with viral marketing campaigns is probably the biggest risk for companies using it, which can lead to the the message not being conveyed in the right way to the audience, and subsequently can mislead the customer (Dobele,et al., 2005; Helm, 2000; Kaikati & Kaikati, 2004, Welker, 2002). Managing the message should be the main procedure of holding a viral marketing campaign. The negative impact of the miss-managing could potentially damage the firm’s reputation, and then the problem could be widespread which could cause product or service boycott, and unfavourable attributes associated with the company, impacting on reputation (Helm, 2000).

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