Is it worth sharing? Evaluating the role of content and emotions in viral marketing

Abstract

Social media has been found to have created a paradigm shift in the digital marketplace by giving a new technological face to marketing, highlighting on brand awareness and effectiveness. In this digital marketplace, emotions lead users to like or dislike, share or not to share messages, thus evoking, influencing and shifting public opinions on everything from political parties to corporate reputations, brands, products etc. It is important to understand how emotions and content relevance make these messages go viral. To explore this relationship, in-depth interviews with people of Generation Y were conducted, who were shown two videos that have gone viral. Findings focus on how the content of these videos and emotions generated will lead the respondents to share them online. Further this study helped design a Emo-Cog (emotion-cognition) induced decision tree model which the generation Y consumers might frequently be using to decide on whether to share the videos or not. The discussion unveils future avenues highlighting emotions in viral marketing. © 2016, IGI Global. All rights reserved.