Viral Marketing – A Perception Study on the Higher Education Students in West Bengal

Abstract

With the rapid transformation in the world of advertising and marketing, Digital Marketing has proved to be one of the most widely used and successful media or channel to spread product or service related information among the target audience. Viral marketing can be said to be a byproduct of the use of digital media for advertising, where the audience and viewers of an advertisement share the ad-content over the digital media and help its’ spreading over the web space at an exponential speed at minimal or zero cost. Viral Marketing aims at spreading marketing messages using help of internet and internet based services like social networking sites, e-mails, online video sites, chatrooms etc. Viral marketing is also known by terms like Network enhanced word of mouth marketing, Stealth Marketing, electronic Word of Mouth (e-WOM), etc. This study, with the help of a questionnaire survey aims at finding out the factors which influence on awareness of the concept of viral marketing and the inclination of the respondents towards viral marketing in the selected study area. Use of Secondary data and collection of Primary data through questionnaires from 230 valid respondents. Analysis has been done with Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in SPSS 17.0. The research has identified three exploratory factors which have statistical influence on awareness of the concept of Viral marketing and the inclination of the respondents towards Viral Marketing.