‘Do it to Denmark’

Abstract

Marketers increasingly try to make marketing messages reach and ‘infect’ social media users, who subsequently share the message with yet other users, thereby ‘infecting’ additional users and spreading the message like a virus – processes often defined as viral marketing. However, what exactly happens to marketing messages when they ‘go viral’ has not received much attention, and the intention of this article is to take a closer look at what happens to marketing messages when social media users comment on and co-create these messages. Drawing on one particular case, that is, the ‘do it for Denmark’ commercial, the article suggests that what happens is not simply that marketers’ original message spreads like a virus. Instead, a diverse set of discourses are constructed and shared as the marketing message goes viral. The contention of this article is that ‘uncontrollability’ of viral processes creates unforeseeable associations and meanings that may have little to do with the original message and meanings – in the present case changing meanings from ‘do it for Denmark’ to ‘do it to Denmark’. Therefore, tourism marketers need to better understand the complexity of viral processes and how co-creation of viral messages may fundamentally transform and transcend the original message.