Middle Earth, Airline Companie, and Viral Marketing... Where is the intersection?

It is obvious that generally, the people trust more when a friend say “this product is amazing” than in a company that says “look, my product is sooooo good! Buy it now!”

Chaffey use in your book, Internet Marketing, the concept of Cs2Cs (Consumers to Consumers). In other words when a consumer talks about their experience with a product and helps the company sell this product.

Build a viral marketing campaign and have a lot of people spread your message is an ambitious goal for every company. So let`s have a look at an example to understand better how to create a viral marketing campaign.

Air New Zealand and the Middle Earth

Before we begin: for those who do not understand the nerd world the Middle Earth is the fictional local where happens the Lord of the Rings history. To film the movie and represent the Middle Earth they choose New Zealand, what increased a lot the tourism to this country.

Knowing that the Air New Zealand knew that a lot of people choose to travel to New Zealand to have the Middle Earth experience so why do not start this adventure before arriving in the country, using the "official" airline company of the Middle Earth?

With this in mind, Air NZ ran a campaign in 2012, when Peter Jackson filmed the Hobbit trilogy, to commemorate this new movie.

The video was a success and have more than 12 million views on youtube. So in 2013 when was launched the second movie of the Hobbit trilogy the Air NZ came with a new video and moreover, they offered a chance to win tickets to the world-wide premiere of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

And finally in 2014, with the last movie of the trilogy, they launched a third video:

The 3 videos together have more than 30 million views! But what bring this success to the campaign?

According to Kaplan, we have three conditions to create a viral content:

Messengers: Basically it means to use the right people to tell about your product. They used the personages of Middle Earth, that were responsible to increase the tourism to NZ, and consequently, the passengers of Air New Zealand.

Message: They use a typical message of safety rules that we see in every flight, but present that in a really creative and fun way, doing this memorable.

Environment: According to Kaplan "messengers will only pass on the message when they think it’s not already something everyone knows about". Here we are talking about timing, the Air New Zealand could do that after the Lord of the Rings movie, but they did not, because everyone saw that, but when Peter Jackson launch the Hobbit trilogy was the perfect timing that renewed the interest of people.

You know other viral campaign that was a success?