ABSTRACT
While the implementation of CRM systems has foregrounded marketing’s coupling with data generation and analysis, there has been another discourse stream with similar connections into scientifi c constructions of knowledge that has co-existed with, and even at times buttressed, the rhetorics of conversation and measurement. Viral marketing (and its rhizomelike manifestations in buzz marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, and connected marketing) has had a profound infl uence on both the rhetoric of online marketing and the argumentative structures that are used to pitch and defend certain popular assumptions informing marketing attempts to theorize and engage with consumer communities. The central metaphor behind viral marketing, that an idea is like a virus in the way that it can spread exponentially across a population, is highly seductive to the mainstream marketing communications paradigm that indexes its evolution on fi nding ever more effective techniques to capture the minds of consumers. In its borrowing of medical terminology, viral marketing possesses the rhetorical glamour of science as well as echoing the headline-grabbing natural power of uncontrollable epidemics.
