We just finished covering the topic of social influence. In today's society, online social influence is widespread. In class, we talked about how informational social influence can include viral videos. In this assignment, you will watch videos from perhaps a surprising viral marketing campaign and answer some questions about this campaign.
YouTube is one of the most popular internet sites in the world. It has a vast collection of video ranging from entertainment to music to TV commercials to information to corporate promotional material, and so on.
With so much content available, it is perhaps surprising that one of the successful viral video campaigns is for a company that makes blenders. The Blendtec series of YouTube videos have received around 200 million views across their "Will it Blend?" campaign.
The firm's videos have the cheesy appeal of a 1960s TV show. Despite this, and despite the subject matter, these videos have proved very popular. Your assignment is to watch two of these videos from https://www.youtube.com/user/Blendtec/videos.
Please choose two videos from the "Will It Blend?" series that have at least 1 million views each.
After watching these videos, please write a short (no more than one page single-spaced) response that address the followings questions.
QUESTIONS
1. Please indicate the titles of the two videos you watched.
2. After reviewing these two videos, outline the reasons why you think that they have proved popular.
3. While they have had around 200 million views, is their message reaching the right target market? Do you think these videos have a significant impact on their blender sales?
4. What non-YouTube marketing activities should Blendtec implement in order to capitalize on the popularity of their videos?
5. What are the advantages of a viral campaign over other forms of promotion?
6. Given this viral campaign success for a blender, what other types of firms/products could consider YouTube as a viable promotional channel?