  By now, Internet word-of-mouth marketing has established its importance for
almost every kind of products. When word-of-mouth spread of a marketing
campaign goes viral, the success of its strategy has been proved to be
path-breaking for the firms. The current study is designed to extend knowledge
about customer response to these campaigns, and is focused on the motivations
that lead them to different responses. Primary goal of this study is to
investigate the reasons that drive this dynamics and to generate a justified
theoretical framework of diffusion dynamics of viral marketing campaigns. A
rigorous analysis of data obtained through a questionnaire-based survey helped
us to understand how people, who are from different age group, sex and
locations, define and evaluate the encounter with a referral campaign online,
in similar and unique logical ways. The key finding was a conceptual framework
of customer motivation which in turn dictates the dynamics of the campaign. We
have identified important themes related to customer motives, like significance
of: incentives and ease, inherent forgetting, reminders from peers compared to
company's remarketing mails, trust and brand value etc. Drawing an analogy with
differential equation-based models of infectious disease spread, this paper
further provides some initial evidence that participation in viral marketing
campaigns has several consumer related dynamical factors which can be
incorporated in an epidemiological model for mathematical treatment, to
indicate key operational factors in ensuring an effective spread of the
marketing campaign.
