6.4 Drivers of Virality

6.4.2 Accessibility

Accessibility drives ongoing WOM (i.e., publicly visible products are cued more in the environment – top of mind), regardless of how mundane it might be.

From the theory of semantic process (Collins & Loftus, 1975), priming can help activate related perceptual or conceptual constructs in memory spontaneously (Berger & Fitzsimons, 2008). For example, prior exposure affects the brand choice of both target brand and competing brands (Nedungadi, 1990). In other words, the activation of one brand can lead to others more accessible, which increases the chance of remembered brands to be included in the consideration set. (Lee & Labroo, 2004) argues that ease of processing drives our positive evaluation, which is also consistent with the discrepancy -attribution hypothesis. The Discrepancy-attribution hypothesis states that if people cannot easily attribute the ease of processing to a source, they will likely attribute it to the positive quality of the target. Additionally, (Nedungadi, 1990) found that recently exposed brands are more likely to be included and chosen from consumers’ consideration set. Repeated exposure to an object increases favorable ratings (e.g., an object, or person) (Zajonc, 1968), which also apply to attractive people (Moreland & Beach, 1992), and brand (Baker, 1999). Behavioral can be influenced by incidental exposure to stimuli because the primes can activate relevant constructs associated in memory (Christian Wheeler & Petty, 2001; Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001; Wheeler & Berger, 2007)

Familiar content are more frequently selected(H. S. Kim 2015)

6.4.3 Emotions

6.4.3.1 Valence

Milkman and Berger (2014) found that contents that are (1) emotional aroused, (2) useful, or (3) interesting have a higher chance of being shared. Consistently, Milkman and Berger (2014) also found that women produce articles that are more likely to be shared because female authors write more comprehensible, useful, and interesting articles.

People share their extreme emotional experience (i.e., either highly satisfied or highly dissatisfied) (Anderson, 1998)

Positive emotion prompted more frequent sharing (H. S. Kim 2015)

6.4.3.2 Arousal

Lastly, people use WOM to persuade others to affect their satisfaction or choice (Berger 2014). Thus, emotionally polarized (polarized valance) are more likely to be shared due to persuasion reasons. Since the goal is to convince something is good or bad, people share extremely rather moderately positive (negative) information.

Virality is partially driven by physiological arousal Berger and Milkman (2012). These results hold even when the authors control how surprising, interesting, or practically useful content is (all of which are positively linked to virality) and external drivers of attention (e.g., how prominently content was featured) (Berger and Milkman 2012). Different emotion evokes different levels of physiological arousal (i.e., activation) (C. A. Smith and Ellsworth 1985). Arousal is an excitatory state that increases action-related behavior, such as helping others (Gaertner and Dovidio 1977). Hence, we see contents that are physiological arousal get shared more. Specifically, Negative high arousal emotions (e.g., anger or anxiety) are shared more than negative low arousal (e.g., sadness). Moreover, sharing negative experiences can help people vent to regulate their emotions Berger (2014). On the other hand, positive emotion high arousal emotions (e.g., awe, excitement, or amusement) are shared more than positive low arousal (e.g., contentment). Furthermore, sharing for the purpose of rehearsal (i.e., people talk to relive positive experiences) helps people regulate their emotions (Rimé et al. 1991).

Akpinar and Berger (2017) posits that valuable virality is virality contents that are beneficial to the brand.

Informative appeals are benefit to brands, but less likely to be shared
Emotional are more likely o be shared, but less beneficial to the brand
Combining both into emotional-brand-integral ads boost sharing and brand-desirable outcomes.
Research is based on Unruly data and lab experiments.

Operationalization via language: D. Yin, Bond, and Zhang (2017)

6.4.4 Usefulness

Wojnicki and Godes (2017) found that sharing useful content can help sharers appear more knowledgeable

Fehr, Kirchsteiger, and Riedl (1998) found that people share useful content to generate reciprocity

Homans (1958) posits that sharing useful content can have social exchange value.

Informational utility prompt readers to share. Informational usefulness and novelty exhibited more positive connections with e-mail-specific virality, but emotional evocativeness, content familiarity, and exemplification had a more significant impact in activating social media-based retransmissions. (H. S. Kim 2015)

Practical utility increases newspaper articles’ virality (Berger and Milkman 2012)

6.4.5 Narratives

(S. Singh and Sonnenburg 2012)

Storytelling is important to branding.
In the social media space, brand cocreate brand performances with costumers.
The process of improvisation is more critical than the output
Managing brands on social media is about keeping the brand performance alive

References

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