Advertising and marketing

Most conventional business strategy books will emphasise the obvious: reliable product or service, competitive pricing, customer satisfaction, after sales support, clever advertising and marketing. Few make allowances for the influence of the Internet and the speed with which information and knowledge can diffuse through an on-line population.

In the second book of this trilogy, "The Ultimate Game of Strategy", I devoted a whole chapter to the spread of information through the Internet. This phenomenon is analogous to the spread of viruses throughout a population. Information, knowledge and gossip can spread from one person to another, one person can affect many others so the spread is exponential. This exponential spreading is speeded up when it involves groups of people (such as on-line newsgroups and discussion forums).

Using this phenomenon for marketing purposes has acquired the name viral marketing. It is a highly effective and costs very little, but, it only works if the product or service is highly novel, breaks new ground or is of exceptionally good value. This provides another rule for the choice of business opportunity:

9) The product or service should be sufficiently distinctive to be able to take advantage of viral marketing.

Note: Many people assume that viral marketing applies only to the people who are on-line. This is not true because of another phenomenon known as small world clustering. The essence of this theory is that because people on-line tend to transfer their knowledge and information to those in their immediate locality almost everybody, whether they have a computer or not, are also influenced by the Internet spread of information and knowledge.