Article

The rhetoric of managed contagion: Metaphor and agency in the discourse of viral marketing

Marketing Theory 2014, Vol. 14(1) 3–18 ª The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1470593113506433 mtq.sagepub.com

Chris Miles Queen Mary University of London, UK

Abstract This article investigates the ramifications of the epidemiological metaphor at the centre of viral marketing. In particular, it explores the tension that exists between the presentation of the viral marketing message as an independent, quasi-organic entity with a threatening, wild potential and the apparently contradictory assertion that it can also be ‘domesticated’ through careful management of its design parameters and infection vectors. The influence of both memetics and the tipping point motif on this depiction is discussed, and the article considers the persuasive advantages of implications of message agency in the marketing of viral marketing itself. This article is the first study of the root metaphors underlying the discourse of viral marketing and serves to contextualise that discourse within the historical influence of memetic theory and the early literature on word-of-mouth marketing, and the more general relationship that marketing continues to have with issues of control. Keywords Contagion, control, marketing communication, memetics, metaphor, viral marketing, word-ofmouth marketing

The discourse of viral marketing is suffused with epidemiological comparisons. Scholars and practitioners talk of illness and infection, compare marketing messages to the Black Death or Ebola and discuss ways to unleash viral campaigns so they can spread like a contagion across communities of consumers. Yet, despite the elaborated use of the viral and contagion metaphors in the presentation of viral marketing techniques, there has been exceedingly little reflection on what

Corresponding author: Chris Miles, School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London, Francis Bancroft Building, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK. Email: [email protected]

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such epidemiological analogies might say about the understanding of communication and persuasion that underlies them. Consequently, I propose to examine the academic and professional engagement with viral marketing from the point of view of the rhetorical strategy at the heart of the technique’s existence in marketing discourse; the contagion metaphor. I will argue that the adoption of this metaphor into marketing communication generates a tension between associations of wild, uncontrollable danger on the one hand and carefully controlled domestication on the other. This tension is at the heart of viral marketing’s success in terms of its professional acceptance yet also puts it into conflict with theories of marketing communication that are based upon valorising the necessity for long-term relationship construction and the generation of deep dialogue between brand and stakeholders. After an initial explanation of the methodology informing the article, I will move directly on to a discussion of the origins of the contagion metaphor in viral marketing discourse. Following this, I will broaden the investigation out to consider the significance of both memetics and the tipping point motif as antecedents to and informants of that discourse. I will then consider the rhetorical tensions between wildness and control, which manifest themselves in the professional talk about viral marketing and consider the implications for the understanding of the communication process that this tension leads to. In concluding, I will highlight the stark disconnection between the contagion-based rhetorical strategies of viral marketing and the dialogue-based discourse currently to be found in scholarship emanating from the service perspective. This disconnection throws into contrast competing views of communication management and communicative agency within contemporary marketing scholarship and contributes to an ironic situation in which viral marketing finds itself promoting a turning away from interaction with the customer.

A note on methodology This study looks at discourse. It examines the ways in which those involved in explaining and selling marketing (academics and practitioners) talk about the type of communication that marketing does (or should do). It is therefore concerned with the persuasive strategies and foundational metaphorical concepts that hold sway in this discourse and, as such, can be characterised as using a methodology of rhetorical and semiotic analysis (Laferrie`re, 1979; Tonks, 2002). So, in this analysis I am concerned with what the sign ‘viral marketing’ represents for those who theorise about it, use it and promote it. Additionally, I will argue that we have to look at the wider context in which the discourse of viral marketing occurs in order to fully appreciate the way in which it draws from and informs the use of other signs and plays a part in the construction of persuasive positions and dominant discourses. I therefore use rhetorical analysis in order to consider the way in which ‘viral marketing’ is used persuasively in the ‘professional talk’ amongst academics and practitioners. I am particularly guided in this analysis by the argument that the metaphors we use to talk about how we communicate have a tremendous impact on how we end up understanding the process of communication (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Reddy, 1979). In addition to ‘academic’ marketing voices present in journals, monographs and conference papers I will make heavy reference to the contributions to the viral discourse of more ‘popular’ marketing trendsetters, like Seth Godin, as well as to non-marketers like Malcolm Gladwell and Richard Dawkins. The discourse of viral marketing is not the sole preserve of marketing academics – indeed, much of the theory and conceptualisation that exists in the field has originated in the

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work of popular marketing ‘gurus’ and non-marketers and has been further extended in the busy, cross-fertilising communities of the Internet.

The origins of viral marketing practice Viral or contagion marketing appears to represent the most significant change in communication orientation in marketing since the inception of the discipline. For a campaign or message to have ‘gone viral’ is now seen as one of the keys to e-marketing success; as Earl and Waddington put it, ‘creating content that goes viral is the ultimate goal of any Internet marketing professional’ (2012: 39). Even though the exact origins of the idea of ‘viral marketing’ remain debated, most commentators agree that it was the Hotmail sign-up campaign, starting in 1996, which ‘put viral marketing on the map’ (Marsden, 2006: xxi) and established the marketing model for the use of online contagion strategies. The short text tag automatically generated at the end of a Hotmail email message that invited the recipient to sign-up for a free Hotmail account contains all the basic elements of the approach: a marketing message sent to a group of people by a trusted, non-marketing, source (preferably, a friend). The Hotmail tag line leveraged the trust that recipients felt for the sender in order to make them more likely to take advantage of the free offer. Of course, put in these terms, the Hotmail campaign was in no way revolutionary. Indeed, marketers had been taking advantage of this approach ever since they had became aware of Katz and Lazarfeld’s (1955) research on the way that social influencers spread reinterpretations of messages across communities via word of mouth (WOM). Their two-step flow of communication model took Shannon’s (1948) transmission model of information flow from a sender to a receiver and pointed out that this transmission is in reality often interrupted by opinion leaders in small social groupings, who heavily influence, through commentary and contextualisation, the reception of messages by the wider public. Research on the two-step flow became instrumental in defining a field of research focused on studying ‘the diffusion of information’ (Bennett and Manheim, 2006; Boase and Wellman, 2001; Rogers, 1995), which has had important implications for medical and political policy. In marketing, it was instrumental in defining the field of WOM communication, leading to Dichter’s (1966) and Arndt’s (1967) separate studies on the links between productrelated conversations between consumers and product adoption, Engel et al.’s (1969) work on the importance of early adopters (or ‘innovators’) in the WOM channel and Stuteville’s (1968) formulation of the ‘buyer as a salesman’. So, viral marketing has a clear connection to Katz and Lazarsfeld’s work on the importance of social influencers, and the way in which WOM disseminated through trusted, respected sources has a powerful effect on consumer beliefs and attitudes. However, while the idea of viral marketing is often presented as simply online WOM, there is one essential source of differentiation. Viral marketing takes the two-step flow of communication and injects a complex set of metaphors into the implied understanding of communication that underlies it. Centrally, the metaphor of viral contagion represents the message as an organic element with its own agency, an agency that lends the marketing message a frightening, and yet at the same time deeply alluring, ability to work on its own. It is this metaphor, then, that is at the heart of the differentiation between viral marketing and WOM and that therefore serves to extend its meaning and significance in online marketing communication. In this sense, viral marketing is a rhetorically elaborated presentation of WOM techniques; its differentiation lies in the way in which it has cloaked itself in powerful metaphors that resonate with concerns and texts inside and outside of the marketing discourse.

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The origins of the viral marketing metaphor While the Hotmail campaign represents the first instantiation of viral marketing in practice, it is Rayport’s roughly contemporaneous (1996/7) article in ‘Fast Company’, which constitutes the first example of the contagion metaphor being used in an extended discourse to characterise the way in which online marketing messages can propagate. Rayport’s thesis is that successful biological and computer viruses have the ‘ultimate marketing program’ in that they are able to do what ‘every marketer’ aims to achieve, namely, ‘have a dramatic impact on thinking and behavior in a target market’ (Rayport, 1996/7: 68). Importantly, Rayport realises that the comparison is one that might be initially distasteful to his readers, conceding the ‘ominous sound’ and ‘harsh’ nature of the epidemiological terminology and the ‘fear or hate’ that the imagery may normally inspire, but (in a clear instance of procatalepsis) he asserts that marketers cannot afford to be squeamish because they are in a ‘desperate’ search for workable solutions in the ‘post-mass-market economy’ (Rayport, 1996/7: 68). In order to overturn the negative associations that are connected with the topic of contagion, Rayport uses a series of rhetorical techniques to amplify the attractiveness of the comparison to marketing practitioners. So, the overarching rhetorical strategy he employs is a very old one: appeal to the reader’s vanity. This works on two levels: Rayport first threatens the reader’s sense of professional mastery by pointing out that something as small and simple as a virus is able to achieve the type of marketing success that they might only dream of. This promotes a sense of discomfort in the reader, which is then immediately taken advantage of by the author when he presents his ‘six rules on how to succeed at v-marketing’. Rayport presents the viral comparison as a distasteful but potent secret that can provide the desperate modern marketer with a competitive advantage over her fellow professionals. Supporting this gambit are a number of other significant tropes. Rayport speaks of the virus in terms that clearly ascribe agency to it. Indeed, it is hard to ignore the intense personification that is present in his descriptions of viral infection. For example, when comparing the ‘turn up the volume’ approach that most marketers use when faced with difficulties in getting through to consumers, he points out that ‘viruses are smarter: they find a way into the host under the guise of another, unrelated activity’ (Rayport, 1996/7: 68). Here we see, again, the author playing with the reader’s vanity by suggesting that viruses are smarter than most marketers, but at the same time this rests upon a personification – viruses are smart, they ‘find a way’. A little later, Rayport praises the ‘unusually patient’ virus that can lie dormant for years before ‘demanding payback’. The portrait of the virus that Rayport builds up is one firmly anchored in a sense that the virus is self-aware, motivated by human-like emotions and drives and possesses a mastery of a series of techniques which should be profitably imitated by humans (whom, it is implied, have similar motivations). This is an important point to make because it really lies at the centre of the way in which marketing discourse has used the contagion metaphor. The viral marketing message is conferred with agency – the ability to plan for itself, to express its will in strategy and action. Furthermore, this agency is often couched in quite marked uses of zoomorphism or even straight personification. These characteristics are repeated in another highly influential source for the early generation of the discourse of viral marketing; Seth Godin’s (2000) ‘Unleashing the Ideavirus’. Godin’s book, ‘Unleashing the Ideavirus’, outlines the strategy steps that marketers need to take in order to design and release an ‘ideavirus’ that will do the work of marketing itself, that ‘moves and grows and infects everyone it touches’ (2000: 11). Like Rayport’s, Godin’s explanations are

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brimming with organic metaphors. For him, the idea transmits itself, replicates itself, mutates and spreads itself. While the marketer takes pains to design the idea as well as possible (to ‘nurture’ it) (2000: 17), once it is released (or ‘unleashed’) into a community it is very much working under its own agency (with its own ‘lifecycle’) (2000: 22). He writes, for example, how ‘some ideas stick around a long time with each person, influencing them (and those they sneeze on) for months or years to come’ (2000: 51), and describes how, because most Americans knew nothing about Audi, when they heard a news story describing its acceleration problems ‘the virus rushed in, filled the vacuum and refused to be dislodged’ (2000: 52). Godin describes ideas as living creatures, which are created, grow, replicate and die (if they are not properly fed). Marketers are portrayed as a strange hybrid between laboratory scientists designing virulent strains and animal handlers caring for their charges. Godin’s work in popularising viral marketing has strong connections with that of Malcolm Gladwell who, first with an article in ‘The New Yorker’ (1996) and then with the book ‘The Tipping Point’ (2000), introduced the contagion of ideas trope to a much larger, non-marketing audience. It is also worth noting that Godin, Gladwell and Rayport were all regular contributors to ‘Fast Company’ magazine and, as such, helped to build the rhetorical environment around early viral marketing discourse. Gladwell’s book argues that social trends are most productively thought of in terms of epidemics; that ‘ideas and products and messages and behaviours spread just like viruses do’ (Gladwell, 2000: 7) and, unlike Godin, he brings a diverse amount of apparently ‘scientific’ research to bear in constructing his argument. Indeed, Gladwell is generally careful to avoid portraying ideas as having separate, organic identities from those that carry them in their minds – paying more attention to the environmental factors that lead people to find an idea more appealing at one time rather than another. Gladwell’s use of the tipping point motif is useful to consider in terms of its relationship to nonmarketing uptake of the contagion metaphor. Marketing discourse is obviously systematically connected with other, wider discourses ongoing in the international news media as well as popular culture at large. For example, the adoption of the tipping point as an explanatory motif for expressing the imminent dangers of climate change is noticeable in the public pronouncements of a number of the major actors in the debate and can be traced back to Gladwell’s own particular formulation of the spread of epidemics (Russill, 2008; Russill and Nyssa, 2009). The attractiveness of the tipping point motif in discussions of social policy is a result of the way that Gladwell ‘works hard to suggest the tipping point perspective is developed from the study of epidemics, so that his principles are simply restatements of the analytic procedures used by epidemiological detectives’ (Russill and Levin, 2012: 157). Scientific vocabulary and the certainty of medical research are strong persuaders – they make the epidemiological analogy appear natural, modern, and rational. In addition, the adoption of Gladwell’s rhetoric into non-marketing discourses helps to ‘normalise’ the contagion metaphor making it appear even more reasonable and natural within marketing discourse. In addition, Gladwell’s central message in ‘The Tipping Point’ is a positive one for marketers. While messages can spread like a contagion, that spread can be influenced by the careful identification of key ‘mavens’ who have the most influence over the diffusion of the infection. Marketers simply need to spend their efforts upon persuading these persuaders and they can harness the power of epidemics. As Fisher and Smith (2011) point out ‘by explaining away the complexity and unpredictability of social network dynamics, this returns a strong sense of control to marketers’ (Fisher and Smith, 2011: 339). Gladwell’s explication of social contagion is one that leavens the

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unease produced through the metaphor of infection by returning agency to the human realm. Instead of being helpless at the mercy of a spreading virus, Gladwell shows those seeking to influence human attitudes and behaviour that they are able to assert control over the epidemic through the control of a few key agents. Ironically, then, Gladwell’s take on viral communication can be seen as emphasising human agency (in the pivotal form of influencers or mavens) while at the same time undermining the universality of that agency by suggesting that if one controls the influencers, one controls the epidemic. I will return to the central issue of control in the rhetoric of viral marketing in later sections. Gladwell’s work, while influential in generating much of the recent political and scientific framing of social contagion and in therefore providing naturalising context to the use of epidemiological metaphors in discussion of marketing techniques, has not provided viral marketing with its most unique characteristics. For these, we need to look at the use that Godin makes of quite a different scientific foil to buttress his formulations of viral agency, namely, the work of biologist Richard Dawkins.

The memetic perspective I would argue that the main reason for Godin’s amplification of the marketing virus’ agency is the influence of biology theorist, Richard Dawkins. Dawkins invented/discovered the ‘meme’, the basic unit of cultural replication. In ‘The Selfish Gene’ ([1976]2006), first published in 1976, Dawkins presented the theory that just as genes can be understood as replicators using human beings as ‘survival machines’ to ensure their protection and safe reproduction, so also there was another kind of replicator, the meme, that used humans to effect their transmission and survival. Memes are ideas, catchy tunes, recipes, design motifs and patterns that ‘propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation’ (Dawkins, ([1976]2006): 192). Godin directly references Dawkins in the body of his text, commenting that he ‘had his own word for the phenomenon I’m calling ideaviruses: memes’ (Godin, 2000: 94). Godin’s development of the ideavirus concept is an attempt to combine Dawkins’ meme theory, Rayport’s earlier rhetorical use of the virus metaphor as a persuasive strategy, and Gladwell’s riffing on social epidemics into a developed, proactive marketing strategy. And it is Dawkins’ presentation of the mind-leaping meme that has influenced the popular acceptance of viral marketing practice more than any soberly written research article. Dawkins has a strong tendency towards the use of personification in his scientific writing (Kennedy, 1992). His ‘selfish gene’ theory has, according to Sullivan (1995), ‘achieved an hegemony quite out of proportion to its intellectual finesse’ largely due to its attractive ‘anthropomorphization of the mechanism of natural selection’ (Sullivan, 1995: 215). Dawkins’ conception of the meme is equally anthropomorphic and leads to a characterisation of the spread of ideas which gives them an agency that is in many ways superior to our own; our minds are, after all, the ‘meme’s way of making another meme’ (Herzog, 2002: 364), they have evolved to be efficient carriers of ideas. It is worth quickly noting that the terms ‘personification’ and ‘anthropomorphization’ when applied to memes and marketing viruses betray a curious double valency in the contagion metaphor. On the one hand, for example, describing a meme (or gene) as ‘selfish’ is a classic instance of ascribing human motivations, emotions or thought processes to a non-human entity for rhetorical effect (viruses, of course, are not really ‘selfish’, ‘smart’, ‘mean’ or ‘aggressive’). On the other hand, ascribing virus-like characteristics to something non-organic like an idea is an example of

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zoomorphism. Actually, the contagion metaphor, and Dawkins’ presentation of memetics, works by first ascribing human-like qualities to a microorganism and then using the resulting understanding of a virus to describe the non-organic nature of an idea. This is the type of rhetorical complexity that has made many uncomfortable with Dawkins’ writing. It is also central to the rhetorical constructions of viral marketing. There has been a significant amount of criticism of Dawkin’s meme concept. Bradie, for example, likens it to the many instances in the history of science of ‘ill-conceived attempts to transfer the cachet of well-established sciences in one domain to other domains’ (2003: 27) and concludes that the idea of the meme is one that ‘affords no real possibility for scientific insight’ (2003: 30). Burman has also written convincingly of the way in which Dawkins’ original formulation of the meme became heavily mutated as it passed through wider scholarly and popular culture, turning quickly into a distinctly ‘unscientific object’ (2012: 75). However, the ‘correctness’ of memetics is not the issue here – my argument is that it has been an influential idea that directly effects the way that Godin and Rayport characterise the marketing virus. And the way that Godin and Rayport chose to talk about viral marketing has, in turn, been influential on the development of the viral marketing discourse. A perfect example of this enshrined in a citation framework is to be found in Golan and Zaidner (2008) when they gloss their use of the phrase ‘viral component’ by explaining to the reader that ‘this viral component is referred to in both professional and academic research of viral marketing as the Meme (Dawkins, 1976; Godin, 2001)’ (Golan and Zaidner, 2008: 962). Similarly, the influence of Dawkins’ memetics in wider popular culture feeds into and supports such formulations in the marketing discourse (as a quick Google search on the term ‘meme’ will show).

The rhetoric of management Dawkins’ initial theory and the large amount of work that has subsequently gone into trying to develop memetics into a viable ‘scientific’ field are all quite clear about the basic assumption that memes evolve over time, sometimes very quickly (Blackmore, 2003; Laland and Odling-Smee, 2003; Marsden, 1998). Indeed, if one pays even cursory attention to the evolutions that occur to Internet memes over the course of just 6 months, it becomes very clear that messages, once ‘released‘ onto the Web, quickly become repurposed, mixed up, transformed and mutated (Burgess, 2008). This is the ‘wild’ side of the meme, its independent, out-of-control and unpredictable nature that can so fascinate us yet also so clearly demonstrates to us its danger for marketing purposes. If a marketer is to recognise this side of the meme, then promising clients that they can build a campaign that will ‘go viral’ is deeply problematic. As Rob Brown points out – ‘whilst we cannot promise to deliver memes as part of a PR campaign we should be able to recognize them and facilitate their development’ (2009: 121). Viral marketing scholars and practitioners are necessarily concerned with message control – if a marketing message mutates across the course of its infection then the value proposition that it contains is necessarily going to change. So, while the foundational metaphor of viral marketing is a powerful and attractive one, it also has frightening implications for marketers. As a consequence, when marketing scholars contribute to the viral marketing discourse in the pages of academic journals, we can notice a clear tension between the urge to maintain and develop the contagion metaphor for its rhetorical power and the need to display a more sober perspective that emphasises the opportunities to control and manage communication amongst consumers.

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For example, Dobele et al. (2005), while largely keeping to a sober vocabulary of deliberate message transmission, actually entitle their ‘Business Horizons’ article, ‘Controlled Infection! Spreading the brand message through viral marketing’, thus amplifying the viral metaphor that their main text seeks to downplay. Kalyanam et al. (2007) compare the viral marketing of Plaxo to the Ebola virus, commenting that at one point it was ‘growing so aggressively that it was in danger of killing its hosts’, spinning an exciting narrative of a carefully grown virus spiralling out of the control of its creators. Pitta (2008) also talks of ‘hosts’ for the viral message, and Kaplan and Haenlein (2011) talk of ‘epidemics’ and ‘infections’, and make comparisons with the spread of the Black death. In other words, the allure of the viral metaphor is strong even amongst those who have a clear interest in portraying the viral marketing process as one which is highly controllable (i.e. where the marketer is able to design and control a ‘viral’ message). At the same time, there is also clear evidence amongst the scholarly voices of the viral marketing discourse of a contrary desire to downplay the wild and dangerous ramifications of the contagion analogy. Such voices are intent on persuading the reader of the manageable nature of viral communication – retaining the use of the core metaphor as a point of differentiation but rhetorically downplaying its implications in order to promote a sense of control. Golan and Zaidner define viral marketing as referring to ‘a broad array of online WOM strategies designed to encourage both online and peer-to-peer communication about a brand, product or service’ (2008: 961). They also reference Helm’s earlier attempt to define the area as ‘a communication and distribution concept that relies on customers to transmit digital products via electronic mail to other potential customers in their social sphere and to animate these contacts to also transmit the products’ (2000: 159). Cruz and Fill provide a far terser but broader description as an antidote to the rather complex and inconsistent definitions cluttering the scene – viral marketing communication is ‘the informal, peer-to-peer electronic exchange of information about an identifiable product or service’ (2008: 746). All these definitions are interesting because they quite clearly attempt to de-emphasize the trace of the viral metaphor. Helm speaks of customers ‘transmitting’ and ‘animating’ and Cruz and Fill describe the peer-to-peer message exchange as ‘informal’ (thus implying that customers are using informal modes to transmit the message to each other). In both of these cases, customers (or prospects) are firmly portrayed as deliberately transmitting the viral message. Golan and Zaidner are slightly more obtuse, stating that it is the marketing strategies that ‘encourage’ people to (again, deliberately) transmit the message to each other, thereby downplaying the receiver’s agency. Goldsmith’s definition, in his 2002 book on the subject, epitomises the way in which many authors tend to emphasise customer agency when defining the practice: ‘viral marketing [ . . . ] involves someone choosing to send a message to a friend or a colleague and therefore being in control’ (2002: 12). He contrasts this with the malicious way in which a computer virus ends up being passed along ‘without consent’. In viral marketing, he explains, the appropriateness of the viral metaphor is to be found in the way that the marketing message is ‘contagious as it spreads’ (Goldsmith, 2002: 12) in terms of its speed and multiple vectors of transfer. To be able to offer control over the viral technique, marketing thinkers need to work against the very terms of the overarching ‘metaphorical concept’ (to use Lakoff and Johnson’s phrase) that they are using to describe it. The viral or contagion metaphor resonates with the consequences of humans being out of control of the spread of an infection – the virus uses us, after all. Attempting to take advantage of the frisson of the metaphor and at the same time deny its terms puts viral marketing in a paradoxical position. So, when a scholar does comment on the uncontrollable nature of viral communication, it is often in a way designed to convey the potential in harnessing such

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energy – Fattah, for example, talks of messages spreading like ‘a bushfire on a gusty day’ (2000: 1) primarily in order to amplify the ‘effortless’ nature of such communication. By far the most common argumentative trope to be found surrounding the uncontrollable nature of the viral message is that of talking up the dangers in order to present a solution. So, Pitta talks of the dangers of traditional WOM being ‘out of the marketer’s control’ (2008: 281) in order to position the gydget.com website that is the subject of his case study as a ‘webpage with content that can be controlled and engineered to convey information, create excitement, and provide interactivity’ (2008: 282). Woerndl et al. identify ‘lack of control’ as the ‘biggest risk’ of viral communication, and yet, in their single case study of a commercial viral campaign (for FatWallet), they note the fact that ‘the company was in total control of the message content’ and had ‘some degree of control over transmission’ (2008: 41). Cruz and Fill (2008) also note the central importance of ‘lack of control’ when discussing the disadvantages of viral marketing, but, again, this helps them sell the need to ‘establish suitable criteria’ for the evaluation of viral campaigns which is the thrust of their article.

Controlling the ‘other’ Marketing scholars, and gurus (like Godin), realise that there is persuasive capital to be had from portraying the viral message as initially uncontrollable while holding out the promise of instructional frameworks for manageable, controllable applications. The meme, the ideavirus, is therefore something to be initially rhetorically infused with agency in order to amplify its powerful independence, but then safely domesticated, or enslaved, by the reassuring management technique of categorisation and itemisation. In the end, then, marketing asserts its control over the ‘Other’ of WOM. The marketing response to the potential wildness of the infectious viral message is to reduce the professional interface with it to a matter of signal preparation and encoding/decoding techniques – techniques for designing the most ‘sticky’ meme and the ‘smoothest’ distribution. In this way, the metaphors at the heart of viral communication and memetic marketing can be seen as clever persuasive feints in a commercial (and academic) environment where the worth of marketing is often questioned. They allow marketers to take advantage of the wild energy of a personified ‘selfish meme’ while at the same time claiming the ability to domesticate it back under/into human control for commercial purposes. Control, as has been pointed out by a number of researchers, has been a vital motivator in the theory and practice of marketing communication (Stidsen and Schutte, 1972; Tonks, 2002; Varey, 2000, 2002). As Stidsen and Schutte put it more than 40 years ago, ‘marketing’s preoccupation with the scientization of the producer–consumer relation has produced interpretations of marketing as a control process rather than as a communication process’, where marketing is therefore ‘something producers do to consumers’ in order to achieve ‘specific outcomes’ (1972: 23). Varey makes it clear that despite a few such protestations marketing communication has continued to be seen ‘as a conduit for the transmission or transportation of expressions of self-interest’, ‘in pursuit of control’ (2002: 94). This obsession with control has long been of note to commentators and researchers on the world of marketing communication. Packard’s ([1957] 2007) study of marketing management’s enthusiastic adoption of the services of the ‘depth boys’ in ‘The Hidden Persuaders’ as well as Key’s (1974) rather more questionable crusade against the alleged use of subliminal imagery are two popular and influential depictions of how the urge for control over consumers lies at the core of marketing strategy. Ewen’s (1996, 2001) work on advertising and public relations, while written outside the

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marketing academy, has brought a formidable level of scholarship to demonstrating the way in which the marketing communication industries have been dominated by a control orientation. Marketing scholars from the consumer culture theory (CCT) and postmodern camps have also repeatedly engaged with the issue of control and how it motivates the marketing process (and the consumer). For example, McCracken’s (1986) description of how advertising executives and creatives use marketing communication messages as tools to transfer meaning into goods is a perfect example of the way in which CCT research often portrays the consumer as the unwitting dupe of corporate techniques to control their construction of meaning. While the viewer/reader must necessarily be the final author of the interpretation of any piece of advertising, the long and involved description that McCracken gives of the careful, professional encoding of meaning underlines the effort put into controlling the ‘successful decoding’ that the message will undergo. At a broader level, CCT research has tended to portray not just formal marketing communication messages, but popular culture texts in general, as ‘lifestyle and identity instructions that convey unadulterated marketplace ideologies (i.e. look like this, act like this, want these things, aspire to this kind of lifestyle)’ (Arnould and Thomson, 2005: 875). Here, marketing’s search for control over consumers’ meaning-making suffuses the whole matrix of popular culture productions. Scholars dedicated to investigating the significance of postmodern consumption have also placed issues of control at the heart of the shift from modern to postmodern business and consumer. As Firat notes, modern marketing concerned itself with attempts to control the consumer; the originators of marketing communication messages felt they ‘had the power to determine the meaning of the message’ (2006: 145). Postmodern perspectives have strongly questioned the veracity and efficacy of such beliefs, pointing out that consumers are as much producers and sharers of meaning in the consumption process as they are simple receivers or decoders (Firat, 2006; Simmons, 2008). However, despite the quite varied series of academic voices pointing out that the urge to control the behaviour of consumers is something that marketing practice should look critically and carefully at, there has been very little indication that such suggestions have been heeded. Indeed, in a marketing era when consumers are connected to each other in ways that make such efforts at control and management more Quixotic than they ever were, it is still difficult for many of the actors in the marketing communication system to realise that ‘the more in control we are, the less we are in touch’ (Laffey, quoted in Ramaswamy, 2009: 36). Additionally, marketing reactions to increasing consumer empowerment have often tended to be characterised by attempts to try and wrest control back from consumers (Bloom, 1982). So, for example, marketing management’s reaction to the consumer rights movement in the 1970s and 80s was often one of trying to re-exert control over consumer organizations via attempting to deny them access to effective public representation (Mayer, 2012; Schwartz, 1979). Nowhere, perhaps, is this tendency more directly stated than by Pires et al. who talk of the ‘need to regain control over the marketing process’ (2006: 936) that has been lost to technologically empowered consumers. They argue that ‘the opportunities afforded to business by the Internet come with a sting of unintended and largely uncontrolled consumer power: uncontrolled because an individual business is unable to restrict the search process and possible choices available to consumers through their use of ICT’ (2006: 937). We might feel that such sentiments are generated by a particularly oversensitive fear of the postmodern, connected consumer and do not adequately represent the ways in which some enterprises do seem to have successfully adapted to far more informed and demanding consumers. Yet, the fact remains that the rhetoric of control is deeply embedded in marketing management discourse – unsurprisingly, given the shared assumptions implicit within the words ‘management’ and ‘control’.

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Discussion Marketing’s use of offline WOM has always been predicated by the urge to control what consumers said to each other about a brand. Indeed, much of the foundational research on WOM, such as that of Katz and Lazersfeld referred to earlier, was motivated by the need to investigate why mass media communication campaigns were not able to predictably control consumer (and voter) opinion (Bennett and Manheim, 2006). The discovery of the two-step flow of communication was part of an effort to regain control of consumers by way of identifying and co-opting the contribution of social influencers. In this sense, the tension within the discourse of viral marketing can be seen as a rhetorical playing out of the tension between marketing’s fear of empowered consumers, its need to assert/ reassert control and management over their informal communication processes, and the simultaneous narrative that such control is fundamentally counterproductive (the ‘still small voice’ of dialogue- and relationship-orientated marketing theory). The Internet has vastly amplified the significance of the two-step flow of communication, presenting marketers with an environment in which they are increasingly unable to manage information flow and opinion. The contagion metaphor at the heart of viral marketing acts as a violent retribution for the talkativeness and connectedness that has made consumers more uncontrolled and more powerful than they have previously been able to be. The viral marketing message infects consumers, half unwittingly, and takes advantage of their powerful networks of strong and weak ties to race across populations at sometimes awe-inspiring speeds. Marketing takes control of the consumer once again, by taking advantage of weakness (just like a real virus) – the weakness for talking to each other, for sharing, which is ironically the very ‘weakness’ that has empowered them on the Web in the first place. The ritualistic nods to the potential wildness of the viral message that I have noted in my discussion of the viral marketing discourse above become a rhetorical strategy that reminds the reader of the wildness of the empowered consumer and therefore of the ‘poetic justice’ of the solution. Just as the viral message is tamed and managed by the marketer, so also that message will tame and manage the interpersonal communication of the population it is released into. The metaphorical granting of agency to the viral marketing message is performed ritualistically so that it can be taken away. The contagion metaphor, and the complex zoomorphism/anthropomorphism that it is usually loaded with, serves to depict an understanding of communication in which a marketing virus is imbued with agency so that it can be managed and directed towards a human population whose agency must in turn be managed. It is the ultimate expression of marketing’s urge to control consumers and their communication. What is most surprising is that viral marketing’s discourse of surrogate control comes at a time when more voices than ever in marketing theory and practice have been calling for an abandonment of the established management and control focus. Scholars of relationships marketing and the service perspective, for example, have tended to argue that firms need to cede control to customers (Schau et al., 2009). So, Vargo and Lusch characterise the old, goods-dominant logic as one in which ‘wealth consists of owning, controlling, and producing operand resources’, whereas the new, evolving service-centred logic sees wealth as something obtained by ‘application and exchange of specialized knowledge and skills’ (2004: 7). Instead of control, the new perspectives emphasise support and cocreation, based around ‘initiating and maintaining a continuing dialogue’ with stakeholders (2004: 14). Gro¨nroos’ redefinition of marketing, for example, focuses on the firm’s role as a promisemaker helping to enable and support ‘the fulfilment of individual expectations created by such

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promises’ (2006: 407). Similarly, Ballantyne et al. describe the way in which a service orientation to value propositions results in ‘a mutually creative co-constructed dialogue’ (2011: 208). Such perspectives have also been supported by research in CCT and postmodern consumerism which has emphasised the ways in which consumers use brands and marketing communication in the construction of their multiple identities and are thus already in a co-production relationship with firms whether the firms ackowledge it or not (Ertimur and Venkatesh, 2010). The significant move in marketing discourse towards narratives and rhetorics of inclusion, support, co-creation, sharing and the surrender of control are quite at odds with the metaphor of contagion that sits at the centre of viral marketing. As Andy Sernovitz, then president of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, points out, ‘none of these sophisticated, crazy viral strategies drive conversation’ (quoted in Ferguson, 2008: 181). While viral marketing gets consumers talking about your product, it doesn’t get them building a conversation with you. The dialogue that the contemporary relationship and service perspectives are premised upon is a dialogue in which the firm participates as an equal partner, yet viral marketing is focused on getting people to talk to each other, not the firm – in effect locking the firm out of the conversational network. Viral marketing, along with the marketing adoption of any of the anthropomorphising communication metaphors around memetics, actually represents a turning away from interaction with the customer – it becomes the virus that does the interacting, the meme that develops the relationship. Whether its viral ‘nature’ is embraced or sidelined by viral marketers, the metaphorical concept of contagion remains at the core of the approach. And, this means that practitioners have to place an emphasis on getting other people to pass on the virus. While this can create buzz about the viral presentation (video, email, microsite or image) this is not the same thing as creating a dialogue with the brand.

Conclusion The contagion metaphor, and the rhetorical strategies that it helps to generate in the discourse of marketing, is a manifestation of the urge for control that has beset marketing management almost since its inception. As control has become even more difficult to reliably assert over consumers empowered with cheap and ubiquitous networking technology so the metaphors that marketing has used in its construction of counter-methodologies have become more violent and more involved, helping to bolster its own need for a presentation of ‘managed’ communication as well as aiding in persuasive professional talk directed at clients and decision-makers. While there is increasing adoption in marketing theory of rhetorics of equality, balanced conversation and mutually beneficial co-creation much of this remains ‘highly idealized in that it assumes near perfect and seamless interactivity between participants’ (Fisher and Smith, 2011: 326). Current marketing practice can offer us precious few examples of marketing relationships which approach anywhere near these idealized levels of equality in the sharing of control. Indeed, the rhetoric of viral marketing perhaps allows us to trace an alternative trajectory to that sketched by the advocates of service-dominant logic (S-D Logic), dialogical marketing communication and the radically empowered postmodern consumer. I have used the word ‘domestication’ to describe the way in which the wild and dangerous aspects of the viral marketing construct are initially paraded and then subsumed under the comforting rhetoric of controlled and managed communication (which often takes the form of descriptions of how the agency of influencers can be subordinated to the agency of marketers). However, the word

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has also been used by Arndt in a way that I think can shed valuable light on what the rhetoric of viral marketing might really mean in the current marketing landscape. Arndt describes a ‘domesticated market’ as one where ‘transactions are moved inside a company (when for instance buyers and sellers actually merge) or inside the boundaries of a group of companies committed to long term cooperation’ (1979: 70). He argues that the generation of domesticated markets is an example of the way in which companies operate in a manner very different to that described in the ‘impersonal, decentralised exchange’ of classical economists (Arndt, 1979: 70). The domesticated market is the result of long-term relationships between suppliers, producers and distributors who reap advantages from established, stable cooperation. Transactions within a domesticated market become governed by administrative control processes based upon ‘negotiated rules of exchange’. An important feature of Arndt’s portrayal of such markets is that within them ‘information is consciously and directly managed’ (Arndt, 1979: 70). Indeed, one of the main advantages of a domesticated market is that it ‘reduces the uncertainties caused by inadequate information’ and as such significantly increases the ability to control supply and demand ( Arndt, 1979: 71). Viral marketing, and indeed the whole panoply of social network marketing, can be interpreted as attempts to create (or significantly expand) domesticated markets. So, in order to deal with the chaotic wildness of empowered and constantly interacting consumers, companies attempt to bring key influencers from those consumers into their own networks. Viral marketing promises to hand control of larger consumer networks to firms through the expediency of enfolding mavens within a domesticated market – by providing them with such internal paraphernalia as ‘exclusive’ content, early review models and access to management such influencers stand to become long-term partners. At a broader level in digital marketing one can point to the way in which large numbers of companies have effectively become partnered with Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Google in an effort to reduce their ‘uncertainties caused by inadequate information’. Arndt’s ‘domesticated market’ allows us to interpret such marketing communication practices as viral communication, blog marketing, and social media marketing as efforts to include key consumers and communication hubs within the firm’s relationship network in order to exert control (and, thus, stability) over chaotic elements in its environment. Interestingly, it might be further argued that marketing theories and prototheories such as S-D Logic, relationship marketing, and the general dialogical turn in some approaches to marketing communication are also in fact reflections of the ‘domesticating’ tendency in current business practice. As Arndt argues, long-term relationships are good for a business network because they generate the opportunity for control. In such situations relationships become stable administrative ties which, while most definitely requiring sophisticated two-way communication channels, are not exactly the type of dialogue based, egalitarian dyads that many scholars of the dialogue-turn in marketing communications envisage. Instead, for a domesticated market, two-way communication is a means to an end – a negotiation that leads to a stable agreement that can then be administered with minimal cost. Yes, such practice leads to long-term relationships that are founded on interaction but the end result is the silence of the well-oiled machine, not the constant buzz of the souk. Consequently, marketing scholarship might be in danger of missing the point of conversational marketing altogether. Conversations are potential points of control for domesticated markets – they are opportunities to come to agreement and hence to assimilate a potential partner into the network. Key metaphors in contemporary marketing, such as those of contagion, conversation, and the network, have powerful ambiguities with respect to issues of control. While simple comparisons of rigid organisational hierarchy charts and seemingly chaotic network webs might give the impression that relationship networks are necessarily egalitarian, dynamic and decentralised this is

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not the case. Examination of the rhetoric supporting and promulgating viral marketing shows us that the prospect of control over networks of conversation is a fundamental part of the allure of the technique. This allure is not disappearing as marketing theory talks about changing paradigms of service relationships and mutually respectful dialogue. I would suggest that a more nuanced understanding of the central place that control has in conversations, relationships and networks is needed if marketing scholarship is to step up to the challenge of exploring the constructions of meaning (and the co-creations of value) in the contemporary interactive marketing landscape. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments throughout the review process. References Arndt, J. (1967) ‘Role of Product-Related Conversations in the Diffusion of a New Product’, Journal of Marketing Research 4(3): 291–95. Arndt, J. (1979) ‘Towards a Concept of Domesticated Markets’, Journal of Marketing 43(4): 69–75. Arnould, E. and Thompson, C. (2005) ‘Consumer Culture Theory (CCT): Twenty Years of Research’, Journal of Consumer Research 13(4): 868–82. Ballantyne, D., Frow, P., Varey, R.J. and Payne, A. (2011) ‘Value Propositions as Communication Practice: Taking a Wider View’, Industrial Marketing Management 40(2): 202–10. Bennett, W.L. and Manheim, J.B. (2006) ‘The One-Step Flow of Communication’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 608(1): 213–32. Blackmore, S. (2003) ‘The Meme’s Eye View’, in R. Aunger (ed.) Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science, pp. 25–42. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Bloom, P.N. (1982) ‘Research on Consumerism: Opportunities and Challenges’, Advances in Consumer Research 9: 520–2. Boase, J. and Wellman, B. (2001) ‘A Plague of Viruses: Biological, Computer and Marketing’, Current Sociology 49(6): 39–55. Bradie, M. (2003) ‘The ‘‘New Science of Memetics’’: The Case Against’, Think 2(5): 27–30. Brown, R. (2009) Public Relations and the Social Web. London, UK: Kogan Page. Burgess, J. (2008) ‘‘‘All Your Chocolate Rain are Belong to Us’’? Viral Video, YouTube and the Dynamics of Participatory Culture’, in G. Lovink and S. Niederer (eds) Video VortexReader: Responses to YouTube, pp. 101–9. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Institute of Network Cultures. Burman, J.T. (2012) ‘The Misunderstanding of Memes: Biography of an Unscientific Object, 1976–1999’, Perspectives on Science 20(1): 75–104. Cruz, D. and Fill, C. (2008) Evaluating Viral Marketing: Isolating the Key Criteria’, Marketing Intelligence & Planning 26(7): 743–58. Dawkins, R. ([1976]2006) The Selfish Gene. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Dichter, E. (1966) ‘How Word of Mouth Advertising Works’, Harvard Business Review 44(November– December): 147–66. Dobele, A., Toleman, D. and Beverland, M. (2005) ‘Controlled Infection! Spreading the Brand Message Through Viral Marketing’, Business Horizons 48(2): 143–9. Earl, S. and Waddington, S. (2012) Brand Anarchy: Managing Corporate Reputation. London, UK: Bloomsbury. Engel, J., Kegerreis, R. and Blackwell, R. (1969) ‘Word of Mouth Communication by the Innovator’, Journal of Marketing 33(3): 15–9. Ertimur, B. and Venkatesh, A. (2010) ‘Opportunism in Co-Production: Implications for Value Co-Creation’, Australasian Marketing Journal 18(4): 256–63. Ewen, S. (1996) PR!: A Social History of Spin. New York, NY: Basic Books.

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