“How Do We Make This Go Viral?” - Emotions as a Factor in Viral Marketing Success

Abstract

Seeing as the current global culture has built itself so heavily around the Internet, digital marketing has quickly become the most efficient way for companies to reach their potential customers. And while this online era of marketing holds its own hoops and hurdles, it also offers a chance for content to be seen by far more people than was possible before. In fact, it offers companies the chance to have their marketing content become so widely spread and seen that it can be considered viral.

This paper aims to explore the emotional drivers behind viral success. The main objective is to build upon recent studies on human emotions as tools in marketing, in order to find out if certain emotions can be seen to lead to higher viral success more efficiently than others. This exploration is conducted by examining a selected group of online videos evoking different emotions and comparing their statistical performance with audiences in great detail. By determining how different emotions make the audience behave as a response, it could be possible to determine which emotions can then be used to increase the overall performance of digital content, in a way that makes it go viral.

According to the empirical results, there are indeed differences in emotions when it comes to the way they make content perform with viewers. Not only that, there are also certain emotional combinations that possess their own respective strengths and weaknesses.