A thought on Viral Marketing- Bangladesh and China.

No doubt people are becoming frustrated and even as close as getting sick from TV ads and the continuos flooding of emails with Junks. An analogy would be receiving so many emails at the Iujmail acount (300 EMAILS IN 30 DAYS) folder that I atlast decided to stop peeking at them. They distract you from your original purpose and intention-basically they add to your pain than gain. What I want to add here is when a certain consumer product has a visible and strong value proposition and it does what it is suppose to do or even surpasses your expectation. The next step people would do, naturally, is pass it by "word-of-mouth". I am a living example to this testament. I once was bombarded with ads by some unknown online cloth retailer. I curiously clicked it and found out that the site was pretty good. www.vancle.com My first purchase from this site as an experiment was a polo T-shirt. A risk minimizing factor, I though,t but after I've tried it on I felt that it offered more than its value.From then onwards I made more purchase from Trousers to right beneath the undergarments. I've even voluntarily passed the companies product URL to anyone who made any online purchase. They all agreed with me that the company have a good depth of product and their price is competitive.

What Vancl are offering is Formal/Casual retail clothing targeting white collar people. And they have succeeded in their goals. Around 30% of Beijing white color population especially men purchase from this site and 10% housewives to their husbands. That is because #1 Free Deliver upto 25kms radius, #2 Good packaging-brings in a feel good factor when you receive it #3 Good quaility of the product #4 a competitive price #5 product mix and differention.

I wish Viral Marketing could play another form at IUJ say for example "Viral Class Schedule". A student gets infected in the class through lectures and he/she personally gives us reminder about homework deadlines and class updates. How many of you ever thought of this personalised class schedule reminder? By phone or human interaction? You could choose your delivery options. I believe we are not far from this idea. Just need a littttllle bit of time for us to accept this revolutionary viral approach.

Anyway back to where I was.Bangladesh internet industry is still at its nascent stage. Information about a new product entrant or even existing local ads don't get to the level of internet dissemanition. The one force that makes consumers buy things is pure, raw TV advertisements. Even then there are lot of get rich scheme activities-where they effeciently employ viral marketing techniques. It's called Multi-level marketing (MLM), also known as Network Marketing, is a business-distribution model that allows a parent company to market its products directly to consumers by means of relationship referrals and direct selling.

Independent, unsalaried salespeople of multi-level marketing, referred to as distributors (or associates, independent business owners, dealers, franchise owners, sales consultants, consultants, independent agents, etc.), represent the parent company and are awarded a commission based upon the volume of product sold through each of their independent businesses (organizations).

Independent distributors develop their organizations by either building an active customer base, who buy direct from the parent company, or by recruiting a downline of independent distributors who also build a customer base, thereby expanding the overall organization. Additionally, distributors can also earn a profit by retailing products they purchased from the parent company at wholesale price.