Viral Marketing. How Do Albanians Perceive User Created Ads Toward Professionally Made Ads?

Abstract

The today’s technology addicted society is making the world change rapidly with a huge acceleration and marketing is trying to keep up. This is leading companies to use internet as a cheap and easy tool to reach the customers. Being as much artistic as scientific, marketing and especially viral marketing, is a field of many questions to be studied and of a lot of imagination be used. The fast diffusion of internet is refining and changing the marketing techniques. Peer-to-peer referrals have become an important subject and marketers are trying to attain the potential through viral campaigns at the same time as the e-mail viruses and spam have made a disorder of electronic communications. This is making viral campaigns always more challenging. In this paper there are identified critical factors of viral marketing. These factors consist on the characteristics of the product or service, structure of the campaign, the information conduit (peer-to-peer), the diffusion characteristics and the content of the message. In the paper there is also given a typology which states the differences between commercial viral marketing, unintended viral marketing and social communication viral marketing. Furthermore, some case studies are given to lead to a better understanding of the theoretical framework. The critical factors that are identified are all important and it is crucial to give importance to all of them. In order to have a successful viral campaign, the characteristics of the product or service must be distinguished and the viral advertisement has to be prepared according to these characteristics. The structure of the campaign must be adequate to the product, there must be made room for diffusion by catching the attention of potential buyers and triggering it. Furthermore, the content of the message is crucial and there is a communication process that must be followed. The main question that the paper answer is that: How do Albanians perceive user created ads toward professionally made ads? To find the answer there are considered different factors and six hypotheses were raised. The hypotheses consisted on how attitude, informativeness, quality, credibility, loyalty and viral score were perceived when a user was told that an ad was a user created ad or a professionally made one. It is found that the attitude, informativeness, loyalty and viral score had a more positive perception when the user was told that the ad was user created, while quality and credibility were not clear enough to fully accept the hypothesis that the perception of users was more positive when the ad was user created. It is concluded that the Albanian consumers are have a positive reaction to viral marketing user created ads. Albanian is catching up with the speed of the rest of the world.