They say that if you send an email to 100,000 people in the UK, it will reach the other side of the globe within 24 hours.
For the usual jokes and cheesy homilies that regularly do the email rounds, that's an interesting fact - nothing more.
But if you are a retailer offering jaw-dropping discounts to a select group of contacts, the rapid rate at which internet messaging goes exponential is critical.
Last Christmas, drinks chain Thresher Group and toy store Hamleys launched into viral marketing of discount vouchers. Both appeared to be taken for a ride as the net disseminated the offer wider than was intended.
Yet the first has come out crowing; the other, smarting.
As Richard Spalding, managing director of seeding agency The Seventh Chamber observes: "You can be sure that every marketing department in the country is talking about Thresher and using it as a case study."
Thresher was the infamous ringleader whose 40 per cent discount voucher on wine and Champagne, emailed to a few hundred corporate partners, spread virally, crashing its website. Within five days, the voucher had been printed an estimated one million times.
Many consumers believed they were taking advantage of a big company's lack of understanding of this promotional medium and rushed to Thresher stores before the offer might be curtailed.
Digital options
Talk was that desperation - fuelled by analysts' predictions of retailers' worst Christmas for 25 years - had vaulted Thresher into a digital promotion that it had not thought through and could not control.
Pundits questioned whether viral marketing of price promotions could ever work - and at what cost to the retail brand.
Then, as a swathe of stores from Tesco to Warehouse followed suit, the Hamleys fiasco hit. A technical glitch on its website meant shoppers were able to combine several 20 per cent discount vouchers and grab a huge price cut on high ticket items, and also use out-of-date vouchers.
The store announced it would not honour the transactions since they contravened the terms and conditions of the promotion.
Claiming such technical difficulties are "more common than people think", a spokeswoman says customers who made "fraudulent purchases", albeit unwittingly, were offered 25 per cent discounts as a gesture of goodwill - but that news hardly made the headlines.
It seemed that email distribution of retail discount vouchers would be a one-Christmas wonder.
But then Thresher revealed its scheme had increased sales by as much as 60 per cent - all of a sudden, the naysayers were less sure of their ground. Some saw the promotion's success as serendipitous. "They lucked out," says Spalding. "It was about the climate - pre-Christmas when people are thinking about booze. The interesting thing was that it came out of nowhere."
But others are convinced Thresher marketers knew exactly what they were doing. Martin Lewis, creator of consumer-championing website moneysavingexpert.com, asked the company if he could publish the voucher on his site, "the day before it hit big". He would have done so even if it had refused, but Thresher said yes to an email alert to 810,000 people and to a PDF on the site which saw traffic of up to 150,000 hits.
Rise of the internet
And now Thresher has revealed to P&I the killer fact: the promotion was profitable. "We wanted to attract new customers to our shops, but never envisaged it spreading as far as it did," says a spokesman. "Customers got a fantastic deal and we did well out of it because the increased sales more than compensated for the lower margin per bottle." The majority of sales appeared to be generated by new customers, he says. In addition, a "substantial number" of email addresses were collected when customers redeemed the vouchers. He confirms that the chain would run a similar viral promotion again.
On closer examination, it's clear that Thresher's 40 per cent offer was only seven per cent more than its "3-for-2" promotion that began more than a year ago and still continues. And that its wines are already more expensive than most. The promotion "wasn't even close to cost," says Lewis.
"It was smashed by some of the supermarket deals," such as Tesco's half-price offer. The fact is that it caught the wave at the right time.
So can this phenomenon continue?
A key driver is likely to be the rise and rise of internet shopping.
Consumers spent £7.7 billion online in the 10 weeks before Christmas - 54 per cent more than in the same period in 2005, according to e-retail body Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG). In 2006 as a whole, internet sales reached £30.2 billion.
"The real strength of retailers' viral marketing is that consumers are one click away from purchase," if stores are online, says Spalding. But, points out Lewis: "You can't plan a viral campaign that goes epidemic as Thresher's did. If you tried to do the same thing again, it wouldn't have the same impact. Now it'll have to be something else.
"A key element was that a lot of people thought Thresher had made a mistake and that they were getting something they perhaps should not. Hamleys didn't like it and Thresher did. You can't play the same game more than once."
Spalding agrees the technique has its limitations. "It's a new toy for retailers and they are riding the bandwagon, but it's not really thought through. They are seeing it as a cheap way to market and letting the audience do the promotion for them, but is it good for the brand long term? What brand equity do you get from the printing of a voucher? Not much."
Getting it right is predicated on a delicate balance of timing, a receptive climate and a sufficiently appealing offer to make it worth passing around, he believes.
The danger is underestimating the power of the medium, says Becky Munday, managing director of Mando Brand Assurance. "The internet gives you word-of-mouth among an enormous audience in an instant. In the old days, you had control over the number of people who knew you were running a particular promotion. Now it's just a best guess."
So what for the future? Greater targeting and price differentiation models are likely to play a large part in viral marketing among retailers, experts believe.
"If you can target the right 10 people through the right sources and ask them to circulate a promotion to their friends, then you can select a useful group and use discount codes to run a very cheap promotion," says Lewis.
This year, he predicts, "web discount codes in TV advertising". As TV becomes increasingly narrowcast, so it'll be possible to promote a particular offer to, for instance, a daytime audience, without cannibalising trade from elsewhere.
Indeed, the technology exists for discount barcodes to be scanned from a TV screen by mobile phone. Such "smart text" techniques could be used to offer a promotion that can be redeemed only between certain times of the day, such as between 2pm and 4pm, says Andrew Orbell, brand director and head of promotional marketing at Publicis Dialog.
"As more companies jump on the bandwagon, consumers will be more discerning about which (promotions) they take up," he says. "The decision will be made on the size of the discount or the sense that they are getting something everyone else isn't; that they are part of an elite club."
But, ultimately, he says success will depend on whether a retailer can "turn a viral discount promotion into a more meaningful customer relationship", backing it up with that most old-fashioned of marketing strategies: great service in-store.
For the usual jokes and cheesy homilies that regularly do the email rounds, that's an interesting fact - nothing more.
But if you are a retailer offering jaw-dropping discounts to a select group of contacts, the rapid rate at which internet messaging goes exponential is critical.
Last Christmas, drinks chain Thresher Group and toy store Hamleys launched into viral marketing of discount vouchers. Both appeared to be taken for a ride as the net disseminated the offer wider than was intended.
Yet the first has come out crowing; the other, smarting.
As Richard Spalding, managing director of seeding agency The Seventh Chamber observes: "You can be sure that every marketing department in the country is talking about Thresher and using it as a case study."
Thresher was the infamous ringleader whose 40 per cent discount voucher on wine and Champagne, emailed to a few hundred corporate partners, spread virally, crashing its website. Within five days, the voucher had been printed an estimated one million times.
Many consumers believed they were taking advantage of a big company's lack of understanding of this promotional medium and rushed to Thresher stores before the offer might be curtailed.
Digital options
Talk was that desperation - fuelled by analysts' predictions of retailers' worst Christmas for 25 years - had vaulted Thresher into a digital promotion that it had not thought through and could not control.
Pundits questioned whether viral marketing of price promotions could ever work - and at what cost to the retail brand.
Then, as a swathe of stores from Tesco to Warehouse followed suit, the Hamleys fiasco hit. A technical glitch on its website meant shoppers were able to combine several 20 per cent discount vouchers and grab a huge price cut on high ticket items, and also use out-of-date vouchers.
The store announced it would not honour the transactions since they contravened the terms and conditions of the promotion.
Claiming such technical difficulties are "more common than people think", a spokeswoman says customers who made "fraudulent purchases", albeit unwittingly, were offered 25 per cent discounts as a gesture of goodwill - but that news hardly made the headlines.
It seemed that email distribution of retail discount vouchers would be a one-Christmas wonder.
But then Thresher revealed its scheme had increased sales by as much as 60 per cent - all of a sudden, the naysayers were less sure of their ground. Some saw the promotion's success as serendipitous. "They lucked out," says Spalding. "It was about the climate - pre-Christmas when people are thinking about booze. The interesting thing was that it came out of nowhere."
But others are convinced Thresher marketers knew exactly what they were doing. Martin Lewis, creator of consumer-championing website moneysavingexpert.com, asked the company if he could publish the voucher on his site, "the day before it hit big". He would have done so even if it had refused, but Thresher said yes to an email alert to 810,000 people and to a PDF on the site which saw traffic of up to 150,000 hits.
Rise of the internet
And now Thresher has revealed to P&I the killer fact: the promotion was profitable. "We wanted to attract new customers to our shops, but never envisaged it spreading as far as it did," says a spokesman. "Customers got a fantastic deal and we did well out of it because the increased sales more than compensated for the lower margin per bottle." The majority of sales appeared to be generated by new customers, he says. In addition, a "substantial number" of email addresses were collected when customers redeemed the vouchers. He confirms that the chain would run a similar viral promotion again.
On closer examination, it's clear that Thresher's 40 per cent offer was only seven per cent more than its "3-for-2" promotion that began more than a year ago and still continues. And that its wines are already more expensive than most. The promotion "wasn't even close to cost," says Lewis.
"It was smashed by some of the supermarket deals," such as Tesco's half-price offer. The fact is that it caught the wave at the right time.
So can this phenomenon continue?
A key driver is likely to be the rise and rise of internet shopping.
Consumers spent £7.7 billion online in the 10 weeks before Christmas - 54 per cent more than in the same period in 2005, according to e-retail body Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG). In 2006 as a whole, internet sales reached £30.2 billion.
"The real strength of retailers' viral marketing is that consumers are one click away from purchase," if stores are online, says Spalding. But, points out Lewis: "You can't plan a viral campaign that goes epidemic as Thresher's did. If you tried to do the same thing again, it wouldn't have the same impact. Now it'll have to be something else.
"A key element was that a lot of people thought Thresher had made a mistake and that they were getting something they perhaps should not. Hamleys didn't like it and Thresher did. You can't play the same game more than once."
Spalding agrees the technique has its limitations. "It's a new toy for retailers and they are riding the bandwagon, but it's not really thought through. They are seeing it as a cheap way to market and letting the audience do the promotion for them, but is it good for the brand long term? What brand equity do you get from the printing of a voucher? Not much."
Getting it right is predicated on a delicate balance of timing, a receptive climate and a sufficiently appealing offer to make it worth passing around, he believes.
The danger is underestimating the power of the medium, says Becky Munday, managing director of Mando Brand Assurance. "The internet gives you word-of-mouth among an enormous audience in an instant. In the old days, you had control over the number of people who knew you were running a particular promotion. Now it's just a best guess."
So what for the future? Greater targeting and price differentiation models are likely to play a large part in viral marketing among retailers, experts believe.
"If you can target the right 10 people through the right sources and ask them to circulate a promotion to their friends, then you can select a useful group and use discount codes to run a very cheap promotion," says Lewis.
This year, he predicts, "web discount codes in TV advertising". As TV becomes increasingly narrowcast, so it'll be possible to promote a particular offer to, for instance, a daytime audience, without cannibalising trade from elsewhere.
Indeed, the technology exists for discount barcodes to be scanned from a TV screen by mobile phone. Such "smart text" techniques could be used to offer a promotion that can be redeemed only between certain times of the day, such as between 2pm and 4pm, says Andrew Orbell, brand director and head of promotional marketing at Publicis Dialog.
"As more companies jump on the bandwagon, consumers will be more discerning about which (promotions) they take up," he says. "The decision will be made on the size of the discount or the sense that they are getting something everyone else isn't; that they are part of an elite club."
But, ultimately, he says success will depend on whether a retailer can "turn a viral discount promotion into a more meaningful customer relationship", backing it up with that most old-fashioned of marketing strategies: great service in-store.