Abstract:
The advancement of marketing tools created cost effective ways for marketers to promote their products and services. Accordingly, viral marketing can be identified as a popular direct marketing tool among marketers across the world. Further, there are relatively a few number of articles and journals published about the viral marketing and it has not yet been covered the impact of viral marketing on brand preferences. Moreover, fast food industry is one of the booming industries which is having high competitiveness all over the world. Hence, intention of this paper is to fill the gap in the literature by examining the impact of viral marketing on brand preferences, ascertaining the relationship between viral marketing and brand preferences and identifying the most affecting factor to brand preferences in fast food industry in Sri Lanka. In this study, viral marketing is conceptualized as multidimensional construct which depends on four dimensions such as informativeness, entertainment, irritation and source credibility. Primary data were gathered through distributing a self-administrative questionnaire and 100 franchise fast food restaurants in Colombo district were selected by using multi stage sampling technique. Descriptive statistics, Correlation coefficient analysis and Regression analysis were used for the purpose of data analysis. The results suggest that all viral marketing dimensions except irritation influence the brand preferences in the fast food industry in Sri Lanka. Further, entertainment and informativeness were identified as the most influencing viral marketing dimensions to the brand preferences in the fast food industry. Accordingly, to develop fast food industry, marketers can use these findings to organize promotional campaigns in an efficient and effectively.
