Push Virality

The third type of organic virality is push virality. This is similar to word of mouth, except that instead of hearing people talk about a product, you see it. Exposure leads to awareness, which could lead to interest and conversion.

“Push” is actually too active of a verb for what’s happening. The person doing the exposing doesn’t have to do anything other than use the product naturally. It’s a passive type of virality—and therefore an effortless, friction-free one.

Here are some examples:

• Physical products: A cool person wears Supreme → you see them on the street → you think Supreme is cool and decide to buy it. AirPods are another example.
• Digital products: When you buy something online and see that the checkout process is “powered by Stripe,” you’re exposed to Stripe. And you’ll recognize it the next time you see it.
• Vehicles: You see someone riding an electric bike / Tesla / Uber (in Uber’s early days) → you register it and store it in your memory for later retrieval.

In addition to being similar to word of mouth, push virality has a close relationship with WoM. When someone sees a product in the wild and gets interested in it, they often talk about it too. In Uber’s early days, riders were talking about how great their product was.

Familiarity breeds preference

Push virality works because when we see something more, we tend to like it more.

According to the mere-exposure effect, people develop a preference for things because they’re familiar with them. If you’ve heard of A and never heard of B, you’ll probably like A more. That effect is at the root of marketing strategies like influencer marketing, guerilla marketing, traditional advertising (e.g., billboards), and really all standard ad campaigns—hence “impressions” as a metric.

Of course, the more market share your product has, the more exposure it will get. All your growth tactics will help with that. Here are a few product features that can also help increase push virality.

Digital product features

Some features that can increase exposure for digital products are:

• Signatures and “credit lines.” Let users or recipients know who’s behind the curtain. Examples: “Powered by Slice,” “Proudly created with Wix.” This kind of language often appears at the bottom of emails sent through email service providers like Mailchimp, Intercom, and Superhuman.
• Buttons and widgets. To order a pizza from your local pizzeria, you might click a button that says “Order online with DoorDash.”
• URLs. This is much subtler, but you could put your company name in URLs. For example, when a company sends out a survey managed by the survey brand Alchemer, “Alchemer” appears in the URL for that survey.

A simple tactic that pretty much all B2B companies can use: Try increasing exposure through clients’ and partners’ websites. For instance, look into getting your logo added to their partners page. This can be mutually beneficial. If your brand sends its logo, you get more visibility. If your brand is reputable, your partner benefits from showcasing their relationship with you.

Physical product features

Physical products have inherent push virality, which can be amplified when you draw attention to your brand. Add your branding to your packaging. Give out free stickers of your logo. Anytime someone puts one on their water bottle, they’re showcasing your brand.

But people will only do that if they like your brand and product. Push virality starts with creating a product people want to push, and it continues with knowing who those people are. Yet another reason why brand-market fit and customer research are vital.

Example: Electric scooters and Segway

Two similar products had very different virality paths.

The launch of Segway in 2001 was centered on word-of-mouth virality: getting people to talk about the product as a way to build anticipation. Everyone was talking and writing about the incredible invention that would be coming to market soon. It would be “revolutionary,” Jeff Bezos said. “As significant as the personal computer,” Steve Jobs said.

The problem was that no one actually knew what the product was. They just knew who the inventor was (the millionaire Dean Kamen) and that Harvard Business School Press had already acquired a book about it for a quarter million dollars. The Harvard editors didn’t even know what the product was.

That could have all been great. Except that when the product actually debuted, the response was a collective huh? It wasn’t a game changer. It was a mall cop transporter. The Segway flopped. Hard.

Compare that to electric scooters. Those emerged on the market more gradually. City-dwellers started using them to get around, with urban centers like San Francisco and San Antonio acquiring thousands of them to improve sustainable transportation options.

As more people used electric scooters along city streets, they gained visibility through push virality. They demonstrated their usefulness in action. Global revenue for the electric scooter market grew 9.8% from 2020 to 2021, with sales expected to triple between 2021 and 2031.

The takeaway: Push virality works—but only if your product has core value and solid market fit.

Electric scooters offer a clear value—they’re an easy, affordable way to get around—and they fit in a market that cares about reducing emissions. At Segway, on the other hand, the marketing team couldn’t validate product-market fit because they couldn’t tell anyone what the product was!

In fact, core product value and product-market fit are essential for all virality types. If users don’t love your product, they won’t pull others into it. They won’t talk about it. And they won’t recommend it to their friends no matter the incentive (unless they don’t really like those friends).

Everything goes back to your product. And the value users get from it.