If you’ve been listening lately to the marketing world, especially the online marketing world, you’ve probably been hearing quite a bit about viral marketing. Basically, this practice boils down to providing some kind of content or service that people actually want so that they will tell others about your business. While it may seem like the latest buzzword, viral marketing has actually been around for quite some time. I think I might even argue it’s been around since the beginning of business. But I find the sudden peak in interest very, well, interesting.

At some point in time, business began. Some men realized that they had an abundance of one thing, but a lack of another. They looked and saw other men who had reverse situations. It seemed only logical, I’m sure. You give me what I need and I’ll give you what you need. This simple practice has over time evolved into what we now know as business. It may look completely different now, but it’s good to remember the roots, so to speak.

As business grew and expanded into a practice and a trade, there were men who began to have the same thing to trade. These were the very first competitors. Since they obviously wanted others to trade with themselves instead of others, they realized they needed to provide some reason for the customer to want to buy from them. Originally, this was done by making the product better, making the service better, or lowering the cost. If you wanted to outsell Competitor A, you needed to offer an extra incentive to purchase from you.

Soon everyone was working their very hardest to make their products better to attract more business. This is the capitalistic market model at it’s core. Companies competing to make better products so the customer chooses them. Unfortunately for the business world, technology started becoming a bigger and bigger factor in communication and transportation. I say unfortunately, not because I believe that better communication/transportation has any inherit negative affect on business (quite the opposite in fact), but because I believe businesses allowed these to be their advantage rather than better products/services.

Before mass communication and transportation, businesses were limited geographically. They could sell mostly to those who were in the immediate vicinity. Once technology overcame these barriers, Company A realized it could now reach all the market normally reached by Company C. Because of this, competition became fiercer, and more importantly, more reliant upon communication and transportation. Somewhere during this period, companies began to focus more on reaching more customers rather than providing a better product or service.

Fast forward to present day. With the invention of the internet and a fairly steady (comparatively) world economy, it has become readily available for virtually any business to set up a global shop. It used to be that the company with the most money to spend on marketing won because they could reach the most amount of people, and that is still to some degree. However, with the ease and availability of the internet, just about anyone can market themselves very effectively for a lot less advertising spend.

This has resulted in an explosion of internet companies. And when I say explosion, it more or less followed that pattern. It got really big, swelled, then burst. People called this the dot com bubble. It was so easy for companies to market themselves, they forgot one very important thing:

Good marketing isn’t business at its core. Good marketing means very little when you don’t have anything valuable to sell. It might work for a while, but sooner or later, the public wises up, and you’re out. And that is what I believe is the cause of the latest trend in marketing… viral marketing. It’s not just about getting your name in the head of a potential consumer, it’s about providing something the consumer wants that your competition won’t offer.

Many companies enact this by including large help sections on their sites or vast amounts of information. Others may simply strive to offer higher quality products. Others create a company personality, some kind of unique persona that puts their customers at ease. They call it a “unique experience.”

What this boils down to is that we’ve come full circle. Business started as providing better products, a better experience, better service, or a combination of the three. And that’s what’s really at the heart of marketing. So much marketing out there is so dishonest because marketers need to make their company look better. I think if we focused less on looking better and more on being better we wouldn’t have to fudge on the truth. We wouldn’t have to try so hard to convince the customer because our products/service would speak for itself.

And that’s the heart of marketing, I think. It isn’t making your company look better, but telling everyone how great your company really is.

So next time you’re in a conversation with marketers and you hear someone talking about viral marketing, ask them why they want to do it. Chances are they’ll say something like, “Then people will actually want to visit the site and we’ll get better conversion rates and better revenue.” That’s only a superficial reason, though. When they say that, tell them, “Why not do it because it’s better for the customer?” See what they say to that.

Next post I’ll discuss the underlying principle of all this. Namely, why anyone sells anything and how that affects marketing practices.