New Sony Viral Marketing Ploy Angers Consumers

The Dynamics of Viral Marketing

The idea of viral marketing was touched on earlier in the blog, but recent decisions by Sony Corporation provide a particularly interesting example of how viral marketing sometimes can hurt more than help. The first link is a blog post about Sony’s recent campaign to promote the Playstation Portable. In an attempt to raise flagging sales of their handheld game console, Sony Corporation contracted a marketing firm to create a viral marketing campaign. Once the website was up, the public easily saw through the ruse. The response was…interesting, to say the least. The website was subsequently dismantled within weeks of its initial deployment, due to increasing negative attention directed at Sony for misleading consumers.

The second attached link is an analysis of buying patterns based upon recommendations. From the statistical analysis, inaccurately targeted viral marketing can cause, at best, indifference to the product, as the purchase vs. recommendation graph shows a power-law falloff as the number of recommendations increases. This is different from the discussed model of social networking, in which steadily increasing probability of a connection was assumed as edges between nodes (in this case, recommendations/purchases) were added. Also, instead of information flowing outward from well connected nodes affecting other groups, the paper shows that it is more likely that at the level of tight, localized groups that the most effect is felt from group like/dislikes, the effects falling off outside of these tight groupings.

In class, we discussed the role of social networks and triadic closure between links in a social network, and marketing is closely related to such. In any sort of marketplace, trust in links between nodes is a key issues, both customer-company (to ensure that a company maintains a customer base), and customer-customer (to add customers to that base). Much as in Kossinets and Watts’ study of triadic closure in e-mail networks, similar buying patterns emerge in close social networks where the recommendations of individuals (customer-customer ties) affect the nature of buying decisions. But the study shows that this is more common in tightly tied groups of smaller sizes, perhaps as a response to ubiquitious marketing.

Therefore, it might seem tempting to tailor your advertising to a specific subset of the network. However, even if the advertising is tightly focused advertising, it has to also be advertising of a compatible type. This stems back to the strength of “trust” ties, or at least respect, between people and a company. At best, it could increase purchases within a specific small subset, and hopefully stir at least some word of mouth. At worst, it can cause extremely negative perception of both the company and the product as a whole, as in the example of Sony. Here, the advertising was seen as patronizing, breaking the trust ties, and thereby the negative response heightened as word spread. Also, from the Sony campaign, it seems that while recommendations appear to be limited to within tight groupings, negative feedback is unfortunately not limited in the same way.