HBS Working Knowledge: Marketing: The Problem with Viral Branding

Want to build a long-lasting brand? A viral strategy is too short-lived to get the job done, Douglas Holt argues in this excerpt from a new book, How Brands Become Icons.

Case study: Snapple: concludes:

"What sticks are stories that affect how people think about themselves in the world. The problem with the viral model is that it assumes that any communication is good as long as it's retold. Much more important, however, is what people remember and use symbolically in their everyday lives. Snapple didn't just get people talking. Instead, the brand served as a role model, a rather absurd one, which provided a silly but meaningful critique of corporate life in the early 1990s"

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