Viral Branding a Bad Idea?!?

I was reading an article titled "The Problem with Viral Branding" from the Harvard Business School. The article essentially states that viral branding and marketing does not support building an iconic brand. Here is my take on this idea:

By using viral marketing to establish a brand, the brand is unable to control the core message that will come to intrinsically represent their brand.

Case study: Snapple

Snapple began branding itself in a haphazard manner ranging from product endorsements by personality-conflicting celebs (Howard Stern)...



...to random ads featuring product mispronunciations and
"Wendy the Snapple Lady".












Snapple enjoyed quick success based on brand awareness and recognition but they ran into greater problems. Starting out as a small company, Snapple was admired by consumers for their misaligned and random advertising efforts. But as the company grew and Coca Cola took over, marketing personnel ran into difficulty when their strictly-run and highly organized marketers tried to continue the randomness of the early days of Snapple. It was difficult to portray the same sense of not trying, while actually trying really hard. In addition, what were marketers trying to communicate to consumers anyways, since Snapple had not really established a core brand identity that would have been created by their consumers in the viral process. There was no bottom, no base, no core to Snapple's message.

The virality of Snapple's success was based on the idea that any repeated and shared communication is good for the initially building of a brand.

But what really matters is an intrinsic feeling, an emotion, a connect to a brand that is not just retold and shared, but never forgotten.

By missing this point and allowing the consumers to brand Snapple (in which consumers did not create an intrinsic message), Snapple enjoyed short-lived success from skyrocketing sales of $700 million in 1994 to the loss of $1.4 billion when is was sold.

***Don't get me wrong, I wholeheartedly embrace, encourage, and enjoy viral marketing.*** But viral marketing should be implemented by established brands with a clear core message to consumers. That way, their message cannot be misinterpreted or even just plain missed.

Here are some examples of great viral advertising done by established brands:

NIKE- Write the Future epic commercial



Anheuser-Busch and the Clydesdale (Super Bowl)


Apple vs. PC Ads