A New Framework for Going Viral

Harvard Business Review

14-05-2025

Not long ago, 'going viral' was the gold standard for marketers. A viral campaign meant unprecedented reach, engagement, and brand awareness. The 2012 'Dumb Ways to Die' campaign by Metro Trains in Melbourne, for instance, was funny, catchy, and inspired countless remakes, parodies, and downloads—making it one of the most beloved public safety campaigns of all time.
But today, the things that go viral often do so for the wrong reasons: controversy, outrage, misinformation, or plain discomfort. Consider Dolce & Gabbana's disastrous ' DG Loves China' campaign: It garnered millions of views—but also incited a global backlash, costing the brand an estimated $400 million in lost sales and long-term damage in its second-largest market. This is by no means an exception: According to a 2023 report by Hootsuite, only 5% of content on social media platforms achieves viral status, and much of it is for negative or polarizing reasons. In this highly sensitive climate, the critical question for brand leaders to consider is: Do we even want to go viral anymore?
The truth is virality isn't dead and still matters. Even with the shifts in algorithms and audience behavior, generating a buzz around your content remains a powerful tool for brands as virality is a significant known driver of both brand recall and consumer engagement.
To help brands navigate the complexities of modern virality, I developed the SPREAD framework, grounded in social science research and refined through years of teaching executive education courses to brand marketers and other decision-makers. This framework empowers teams to critically unpack, assess, and optimize the viral potential of their content before it's released and helps ensure that what they produce is impactful and safe to share.
Following are the six dimensions of the SPREAD framework.
Socially Useful and Sensitive
Campaigns that succeed today often do more than entertain—they help audiences do or say something valuable. Duolingo, for instance, used its viral owl mascot in 2024 to champion language equity. Through TikTok, it promoted multilingual literacy programs, leading to over 800 million views across user-generated videos and a 54% year-over-year increase in app downloads globally.
Or consider Dove's 'Cost of Beauty' campaign, which spotlighted the impact of social media on youth mental health. The brand partnered with mental health organizations, leading to over 6.6 billion impressions in the U.S. and a 5.5% increase in value sales. The campaign's resonance was deeply personal: By sharing it, people were able to signal empathy, alignment with body positivity, and their support for mental health, helping others while also reinforcing their own values. This blend of individual identity expression and social contribution helps explain the ad's powerful reach. Together, social utility and sensitivity drive shares because they encourage the act of sharing.
Questions to gauge whether content is socially useful and sensitive:
Does the content offer value or meaning to the sharer (for example, by helping them to signal their values to others, or by strengthening social bonds between the sharer and their audience?)
Is it content people will feel good sharing and that amplifies values such as empathy or personal identity?
Will sharing this content reflect positively on the sender's relationship with recipients (both existing followers and new viewers)?
Does this content ignore or trivialize current social sensitivities?
Provocative
Great campaigns prompt people to reflect—even argue—as long as it is strategic and culturally sensitive. Provocative content challenges norms, surprises audiences, or sparks curiosity, a known driver of human sharing. Patagonia's 'Don't Buy This Jacket' campaign is another prime example, as it urged consumers to reconsider overconsumption while aligning with the brand's mission to champion sustainability.
Similarly, Elf Beauty launched the 'So Many Dicks' 2024 campaign as a bold move to highlight the overrepresentation of men named Richard, Rick, or Dick on U.S. boards (vs. women or people from underrepresented groups). By leveraging cheeky humor and a provocative title, the brand effectively put the spotlight on the lack of diversity of corporate boards, achieving 2.3 billion organic media impressions and boosting awareness by 20%.
But not all provocation is productive, especially when it doesn't take into account the broader system. Take Apple's 2023 ' Crush!' iPad ad. Intended to spark global dialogue around creativity, tech, and AI, it ended up receiving a massive backlash for appearing tone deaf (destroying creative tools, the very positioning of Apple, core to the brand followers' identity). The lesson? Provocation should serve a point, not just grab attention.
Similarly, even campaigns with good intentions can backfire when they seem to overlook social pain points. For example, Pepsi's 2017 ad featuring Kendall Jenner attempted to tap into the power of protest imagery to promote unity—but trivialized serious movements like Black Lives Matter by suggesting that a soft drink could resolve systemic tensions. The backlash was swift and global: The ad was pulled within 24 hours, and Pepsi issued a public apology.
Questions to gauge whether content is provocative:
Does this content challenge norms or spark curiosity?
How surprising or counterintuitive is the format or message of the content?
Does this content provoke in a way that could read as tone deaf or offensive? For example, does it oversimplify complex issues? Offer the brand as a quick fix to systemic problems? Does it characterize itself as a hero (rather than amplify affected voices)? Does it adopt a prescriptive tone, telling people what they should do?
Replicable
Memes, challenges, and remixes thrive because they give people a sense of ownership or participation with the campaign. For instance, TikTok's 2024 'Roman Empire' trend—where users joked about how often men think about ancient Rome—triggered brands like Netflix, Domino's, and even academic institutions to co-opt it. The original trend sparked over 2.1 billion views, with 12,000+ brand-affiliated remakes. Heinz's 'Draw Ketchup' campaign also nailed this approach. By asking fans to 'draw ketchup' and post it online, it generated over $5.8 million in earned media, 127 times the initial media investment, and led to limited-edition bottles selling out in under three hours. The key is to make it easy for people to feel engaged and able to participate.
Questions to gauge whether content is replicable:
How easy would it be for someone to copy, remix, or respond to this content?
Does this content make users want to engage and create their own version (e.g., by actively encouraging memes, remixes, duets, or challenges?)
Is the content too complex or polished to inspire user participation?
Emotional
Activating emotions —and, in particular, engineering emotional roller coasters—drives virality. But in today's climate, relevant emotions matter more than just intensity. Airbnb's 'Made Possible by Hosts' built emotional journeys through real stories of travelers reconnecting with loved ones. By tapping into nostalgia and reconnection after Covid, the series resonated deeply with audiences emerging from pandemic lockdowns and resulted in a 15% increase in overall traffic in the third quarter of 2021 in countries where the campaign has run, compared to 2019. After six months running the campaign, Airbnb posted its highest-ever profit, with net income up 280% year on year to $834 million. Compare this to Peloton's infamous ' Christmas Gift' ad, which tried to tug at emotions but was interpreted as tone deaf and sexist—a reminder that misreading emotional tone can backfire.
Questions to gauge whether content is emotional:
Does this content evoke a strong emotional response (e.g., joy, sadness, awe)?
Does the emotion evoked seem relevant and aligned to the product being advertised or the aim of the campaign?
Ambiguous
Ambiguity sparks curiosity—and fuels sharing. Lego's ' Rebuild the World' campaign used surreal, dreamlike scenes that defied logic, prompting viewers to interpret the campaign in their own way, resulting in a 14% revenue increase. Similarly, Indian fashion brand Wrogn, co-founded by cricketer Virat Kohli, launched the ' Wrogn Mystery ' campaign in March 2023. The brand posted cryptic images of Kohli with unrelated objects, captioned with #IYKYK ('If You Know, You Know'), prompting fans to decipher the hidden meanings. The campaign achieved over 42 million impressions in a single day.
Ambiguity works because people enjoy the process of decoding —and sharing—their theories. Similarly, Fix Dessert Chocolatier's recent global success stemmed, in part, from an initial lack of clarity about the brand's origins. This fueled curiosity and sparked discussions, encouraging audiences to explore further and discover more about the product.
Questions to gauge whether content is ambiguous:
Does this content leave space for different interpretations or personal meaning?
Do parts of the content trigger curiosity or leave unanswered questions?
How likely is it that people will discuss or debate what this content really means?
Distributive
Finally, content must be designed for distribution—not just creation. Content that travels well adapts to the logic of multiple platforms—from TikTok remixes and Instagram reposts to Reddit threads and forwarded messages on WhatsApp. This means it's not overly reliant on one channel's norms (like trending sounds or visual filters), but built around formats, stories, or tropes that people can pick up and modify to fit anywhere.
While replicable content invites imitation (like challenges or memes), distributive content is engineered to travel—to be frictionless across channels, formats, and audiences. For example, the #DollyPartonChallenge—where users posted four versions of themselves for LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Tinder—spread widely because it naturally invited replication across platforms, not just one. Similarly, Disney's #ShareYourEars campaign made sharing effortless by inviting fans to post photos of themselves wearing Mickey Mouse ears, each post contributing to a donation for the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
In the same vein, the 2023 Barbie movie marketing team developed memes, filters, and visual 'templates' explicitly made to be shared. Their AI-generated poster-creator tool led to over 4 million user-made images in one month, helping 'Barbenheimer' become a cultural phenomenon.
In distributive campaigns, marketers prompt people to tag others (e.g., through a challenge like 'Tag someone who'd ace this in 3 seconds' or identity-specific framing like 'Only 90s kids will remember this' or 'Tag a fellow runner who gets this'). These campaigns also create clever hashtags and encourage their audience to use them, thus adding their individual contributions to the broader community. For example, Barbie marketers encouraged people to use the hashtag #Barbiecore on photos or videos in which they were dressed in pale pink. Similarly, Fix Dessert Chocolatier's 'Can't Get #Knafeh Of It,' asked people to use the #knafeh hashtag when they ate or reviewed Fix Dessert's chocolate on any of their social media platforms.
Questions to gauge whether content is distributable:
Does the format make sharing effortless—for example, by offering clear prompts (like 'Tag a friend who…'), easy-to-copy templates, campaign-specific language (like hashtags), or native platform features like one-click reposts or sticker integrations?
Is it easy to imagine people sharing or amplifying this content across different channels?
Does the message actively nudge recipients to share the content with others (for example, via Instagram or TikTok)?
. . .
The point of this framework is not to answer 'yes' to every question, but to give brands the ability to align on which aspects of virality they hope to hit upon with their campaign.
Now that algorithms prioritize personalized content over broad reach, engagement metrics have evolved to focus on meaningful interactions, and audience behavior has become more discerning and fragmented. The SPREAD framework provides a roadmap for brands to achieve resonance and relevance and build authentic connections, helping them cut through the noise and stand out for all the right reasons. By carefully balancing the six dimensions, brands can create content that resonates without compromising their values.