It's a Barbie world - virality fundamentals from a great marketing campaign 🧠👚
Lessons from a viral marketing campaign and what you can also apply 👛
If something is built to show, it is built to grow — Jonah Berger
A few months ago, I started noticing memes from the Barbie movie circulating on social media. Later on, I got email campaigns from retailers advertising their new pink collection. Last week, when walking into my gym, I saw a woman using a Barbie T-shirt.
🧠 How did the Barbie movie campaign manage to get EVERYONE talking about it?
The Barbie movie campaign is one of the largest viral marketing campaigns ever created. It was launched on April, but its producers have been working on it for years. The campaign included memes, billboards, brand partnerships and even a human-size Barbie house available for rent on Airbnb.
In this post, I dive into the virality fundamentals behind this campaign.
Fundamentals of virality
In the book Contagious - why things catch on, author Jonah Berger describes 6 principles of virality:
Social Currency - people share things that make them look good.
Triggers - people share things depending on the context.
Emotion - high-arousal emotions are better at triggering actions.
Public - if it’s built to show, it’s built to grow.
Practical Value - users perceive value in irrational ways, so be strategic about that.
Stories - make the brand or product be part of a narrative.
Notice how they become an acronym for ‘STEPPS’. Here’s how Barbie uses each of these principles, and how you can also apply them to any brand or product.
Social currency
Social currency happens in many ways, and is both a driver and an output that reinforces virality.
Social currency is a growth driver for newsletters, for example. People will share articles that will make them look smarter. 😁 You can share this one ;)
Another example comes from milage programs: whenever you get a great deal on a flight from United Airlines, you are likely to share this with others. Gamification and member-get-member marketing strategies play a great role in building social currency.
As an output, think of this: if you walk into your office’s coffee break and realize that everyone is talking about the new Barbie movie, you will not want to be the only person who does not have a clue of what others are talking about.
Triggers
Getting people to talk about your product is not easy, but psychological triggers facilitate this. 🍫 KitKat, for instance, famously created an ad campaign that related coffee breaks and chocolate. And Barbie… well, it has been fostering a pink, Barbie world!
Pink billboards - which only contain the film's release date - have appeared in cities worldwide. Partnerships with retailers such as Zara (and many others) are fostering people to dress in pink more than ever.
All to make you suddenly remember of Barbie 💭.
Emotion
High-arousal positive emotions are more likely to be shared than any other emotion. Note: author Jonah Berger also discovered that people were more likely to share articles that evoked anger or anxiety, as these are also high-arousal emotions. What matters is: no blasé emotions when trying to create virality.
For Barbie, one remarkable thing is that the product itself evokes high-arousal emotions. Barbie is the toy that girls played with before the screens and videogames era, bringing up memories of childhood and fairy tales.
Plus, if there is anything that Barbie is NOT, is blasé 😆: its bright, pink colors evoke cheerfulness and happiness.
Public
If it’s built to show, it’s built to grow. If your brand or product can leave observable residuals, that helps people remember it.
From tote bags and phone covers to automated messages such as ‘‘this meeting was created with Calendly’’, any brand residual that is visible helps.
Lets go back to the Barbie movie case. In April 2023, new memes started circulating in social media. Anyone could visit the website barbieselfie.ai and create their own version of the movie’s poster.
The memes quickly became viral, triggering companies and influencers to post their version of the memes.
Practical value
People perceive value in irrational and not obvious ways. Hermes, for instance, is a luxury brand that famously built its reputation around scarcity value.
For offers, there’s what marketers call the Rule of 100. This is a rule for framing offers: for big-ticket items priced >$100, absolute price discounts are more attractive. For low ticket items or <$100, percentage discounts are perceived as larger.
The Barbie movie campaign became almost a synonym of hype, coolness and even a certain wokeneness. Not to mention what the film itself transmits of intrinsic quality: it contains only topnotch actors such as Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Helen Mirren and Issa Rae. The soundtrack brings Dua Lipa, Tame Impala, Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice who've combined to sample the original Barbie Girl by Aqua.
Stories
Humans are not very good at processing information. Instead, they are better at processing stories.
Therefore, virality is most valuable when the brand or product are integral to a story and not just part of a billboard.
If you can make users include testimonials about your product on any given day, that is the best word-of-mouth you can ever get. That is why brands provide incentives for review writing - reviews feel very much like a story.
I still don’t know how the Barbie movie story will play out among consumers. I guess I have to wait until July 21st! 📅
References from this post
📚 Contagious - why things catch on, by Jonah Berger
Other posts about virality: Viral Growth: How to Keep Lightning in the Bottle, by
What else I have been reading & listening to
📚 Blockchain chicken farm and other stories of Tech in China’s countryside, by Xiaowei Wang
🔉The Great resignation is over, at The Daily podcast
🎬 Asteroid City, by Wes Anderson
Any recommendations? Let me know on the comments bellow 💬