A Framework to Design Viral Marketing Campaigns on Social Networks for B2C Services in Iran

With the rise of information technology and its ability to bring individual consumers, together in new force, a viral approach to marketing seems less like an imperative than an option. Though the term Viral Marketing has been around for several years, the marketing world’s understanding of viral marketing is still in its infancy. Though the research surrounding viral marketing has been of relatively high quality, most of them focus on different components of viral marketing campaigns and none of them helps marketers to develop their viral marketing campaign from beginning to end and implement it. The aim of this study is providing an integrated framework with a holistic approach to design a viral marketing campaign on social networks for B2C services in Iran, to be used in order to understand and design better the components of a viral marketing campaign and how they must come together in order to obtain the expected results. For this purpose, first, by reviewing the literature using meta-synthesis, 148 codes were extracted which were classified into 23 themes and 13 categories, and presented in a framework to design viral marketing campaigns on social networks for B2C services. Afterward, in order to revise the framework extracted by meta-synthesis according to the business environment in Iran, a semi-structured interview was used to collect data from industry professionals having experience on designing and implementing viral marketing campaigns for B2C services, and the results were analyzed by content analysis. Based on the obtained results, the final research framework to design viral marketing campaigns on social networks for B2C services in Iran was presented.