A ten-foot ball of hair rolls through Manhattan. A man spends several days living inside a billboard above Sunset Boulevard. A skincare brand persuades millions of people to entertain the idea that actor Michael Cera secretly created CeraVe.
None of these ideas follows the conventional advertising formula of presenting a product, listing its benefits, and asking the customer to buy.
Yet all three demonstrate something brands increasingly understand about modern marketing: the most talked-about campaigns do not simply reach an audience. They give the audience a reason to continue the story.
That distinction sits at the heart of marketing psychology.
Platforms can amplify a campaign, algorithms can extend its reach, and media budgets can put it in front of millions of people. None of those things guarantees that someone will send it to a friend, mention it at work, post a reaction or search for the brand later.
People share for their own reasons.
Research into word of mouth increasingly supports that view. Jonah Berger’s 2025 review in the Annual Review of Psychology argues that what people communicate is influenced by the audience, the channel, and the social purpose the communication serves. Word of mouth is not merely the mechanical transmission of information; it is also shaped by what sharing allows people to express, signal, or accomplish.
For marketers, that leads to a more useful question than how to “make something viral”:
What makes a campaign worth passing on?
Marketing Psychology Begins Before the Algorithm
It is tempting to explain every successful digital campaign through distribution. TikTok picked it up. Instagram pushed the Reel. Influencers amplified it. The press covered it.
Those factors can determine scale, but they do not explain why people wanted to participate in the first place.
The psychological trigger comes earlier. Someone sees something surprising, funny, useful, provocative, or personally relevant. That reaction creates enough motivation to watch longer, click, comment, send it to someone else, or add their own interpretation.
The platform then has something to amplify. This is why brands that obsess only over algorithmic tactics can miss the more fundamental challenge.
Distribution determines how many opportunities a campaign receives to attract attention. Psychology influences whether those opportunities turn into conversation.
People Share What Moves Them, Not Simply What Makes Them Happy
Emotion is one of the clearest drivers of social transmission, but the relationship is more nuanced than the familiar instruction to “make people feel something.”
Research by Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman examined the sharing patterns of The New York Times articles and found that emotional arousal played an important role. Content associated with high-arousal emotions such as awe, excitement, anger, and anxiety was more likely to be shared, while lower-arousal emotions such as sadness were associated with less sharing. Surprise, practical usefulness, and interest also had positive relationships with virality.
For marketing, this helps explain why very different campaigns can generate conversation.
A funny advertisement creates excitement. A remarkable product demonstration can produce surprise. A campaign addressing injustice may provoke anger. An unexpected public installation may create disbelief.
The common element is not whether the emotion is positive or negative. It is whether the campaign creates enough psychological activation for the audience to do something with the feeling.
That is why a perfectly pleasant advertisement can disappear without a trace while a genuinely surprising one becomes a talking point.
The goal is not emotional excess. It is emotional consequence.
Curiosity Works Because People Want to Close the Gap
Some campaigns spread before audiences even understand what they are looking at.
K18 used that mechanism in August 2026 when a ten-foot “Tumblehair”, made from a mixture of real and synthetic hair, appeared on the streets of New York. The installation moved through neighbourhoods including Midtown, the West Village and Chinatown before arriving at Sephora Meatpacking. It was designed to draw attention to hair shedding and premature hair ageing.
The first reaction, however, did not require an understanding of the product.
It required a question: Why is a giant ball of hair rolling through Manhattan?
That question has considerable psychological power.
George Loewenstein’s influential work on curiosity describes it as arising when people recognise a gap between what they know and what they want to know. Once that gap becomes salient, resolving it can feel unusually compelling.
Good campaign curiosity works in much the same way. It provides enough information to establish that something unusual is happening, but not so much that there is nothing left to discover.
The danger is equally important. Curiosity needs a satisfying answer. If the reveal is weaker than the setup, the campaign may win attention and lose credibility.
Surprise Works Best When the Idea Can Be Retold Easily
Netflix’s promotion for The Last House offers another useful example.
In August 2026, actor Nathan Shoop spent several days inside a furnished living-room installation built into a billboard around 30 feet above Sunset Boulevard. The activation translated the film’s premise of being trapped inside a house into a physical spectacle visible from the street.
The psychological appeal came partly from scale and novelty, but the campaign also possessed another valuable quality: it was remarkably easy to explain.
“Netflix put a man inside a billboard.” That sentence carries almost the entire idea.
This matters because campaigns do not spread only through formal sharing buttons. They travel through conversations, screenshots, group chats, office discussions, and media headlines. The easier an idea is to retell without losing what makes it interesting, the easier it becomes for audiences to become distributors.
Complex campaigns can be brilliant, but complexity creates friction. Ideas with a simple narrative core have a natural advantage in word of mouth.
People Often Share Campaigns Because of What Sharing Says About Them
Brands naturally view campaigns through their own objectives: the product they are promoting, the message they want to communicate, and the action they hope customers will take. Audiences, however, often share content for very different reasons.
Passing a campaign on to someone can signal, “You’ll find this funny,” “This is clever,” “Can you believe they did this?” or “This reminded me of our conversation.” In that moment, the campaign becomes more than advertising; it becomes a piece of social currency.
Jonah Berger’s recent work on interpersonal communication reinforces this idea, showing that people adapt what they share according to the audience, the channel, and the social context. Sharing can shape how people are perceived, strengthen relationships, and help individuals express something about themselves.
This helps explain why culturally fluent campaigns often travel further than straightforward promotional messages. They offer audiences more than product information; they provide humour, identity, status, relevance, usefulness, or a reason to connect with someone else.
For businesses, the implication is clear: brands may create the campaign, but audiences need their own reason to carry it forward.
Duolingo Turned Brand Knowledge Into a Shared Joke
Duolingo’s fictional “death” of its owl mascot in 2025 demonstrates how powerful that shared understanding can become.
The company announced that Duo had died and allowed the absurd storyline to develop across social platforms. According to an Ogilvy Cannes Lions case study, the campaign generated more than 2.5 billion impressions and contributed to a record 2.5 million users in a single day.
The campaign worked because the audience already knew the character.
For years, Duolingo had developed an exaggerated online personality around Duo, including jokes about reminders, streaks, and the mascot’s persistent attempts to make users complete lessons. When the brand announced Duo’s death, the audience understood the context immediately.
The joke did not have to be explained from the beginning.
People could add their own reactions, theories, and memes because they already understood the language of the brand.
The lesson is not that companies should manufacture fictional deaths for their mascots. It is that strong brand assets give audiences something familiar to play with.
A viral moment can produce temporary attention. A recognisable character, tone or narrative world makes repeated participation easier.
Participation Changes the Audience’s Role
Rare Beauty used a different psychological mechanism in New York in August 2026.
To promote Rare Beginnings Eau de Parfum, the brand installed an oversized working rollerball that people could physically use to apply and experience the fragrance. The activation ran on August 8 and 9 and invited visitors to interact directly with the installation rather than simply view an advertisement.
The format addressed a basic difficulty in fragrance marketing: scent cannot be communicated effectively through an image alone.
The experience gave people something to do, but more importantly, the interaction served the product.
Interactive advertising can become gimmicky when participation exists only to generate photographs. Stronger activations use participation to deepen understanding, create sensory memory, or make the product easier to experience.
The audience is no longer simply watching the marketing. It becomes part of it. That participation can also produce a second layer of distribution as visitors photograph, film, and describe what they experienced.
Stories Give Campaigns Somewhere to Go
The most effective campaigns increasingly behave less like isolated advertisements and more like narratives that unfold over time. CeraVe’s Michael Cera campaign remains one of the clearest examples.
For three weeks before the 2024 Super Bowl, CeraVe and Ogilvy encouraged the deliberately absurd idea that actor Michael Cera might somehow be behind the skincare brand. Social posts, influencer content, and staged appearances gradually built the joke before the Super Bowl commercial resolved it by returning to the real product message: CeraVe is developed with dermatologists.
Ogilvy later reported that the campaign generated more than nine billion impressions before the Super Bowl broadcast.
Its strength was not simply the celebrity pun, but the way the story developed. Audiences encountered the claim, watched new “evidence” appear, saw the idea escalate and eventually received a clear resolution. Each stage created another reason to follow the campaign because the narrative had not yet reached its conclusion.
Research on narrative transportation helps explain why this approach can be effective. A 2025 study in Psychology & Marketing found that when audiences become mentally absorbed in a story, that engagement can influence how they respond to the brand behind it.
For marketers, the practical lesson here is that a campaign that develops as a story can generate repeated attention without repeatedly delivering the same message.
Controversy Can Generate Conversation, but Only Up to a Point
Another common assumption in marketing is that controversy automatically drives engagement.
The research suggests a more complicated picture. Studies published in the Journal of Consumer Research found that low levels of controversy could increase discussion by making a topic more interesting, but as controversy increased, discomfort began to outweigh that interest and conversation became less likely.
Context also affected the result. What people were willing to discuss depended partly on whether they were talking to friends or strangers and whether the setting offered anonymity.
This is particularly relevant in an era when brands can generate engagement by provoking outrage.
Controversy can make a campaign visible. It can also make the brand exhausting, polarising or difficult to trust.
The more useful marketing question is therefore not, “Will this make people angry enough to comment?”
It is whether the tension strengthens the brand idea or merely generates activity around it.
Provocation without strategic relevance is often little more than rented attention.
Conversation Has Limited Value If Nobody Remembers the Brand
There is another trap in campaign psychology: confusing the popularity of the idea with the effectiveness of the advertising.
An activation can generate millions of views while leaving the brand itself almost invisible.
A joke can become famous while the product is forgotten.
A celebrity can dominate discussion while the customer struggles to remember what was being advertised.
This is why the best campaign ideas connect their psychological trigger directly to the brand.
CeraVe’s Michael Cera joke was built around the company’s name and eventually returned to its dermatologist positioning.
K18’s giant hairball connected the spectacle to hair shedding.
Rare Beauty’s rollerball allowed people to experience the fragrance itself.
Netflix’s living billboard recreated the central tension of the film it was promoting.
The psychology did not sit on top of the campaign as decoration. It carried the commercial idea.
That is the difference between attracting attention and building memory.
What Marketers Can Learn From Campaigns People Talk About
The strongest campaigns do not rely on one universal formula, but several principles emerge from the psychology behind them.
Create a Reaction Before Asking for an Action
A campaign is more likely to travel when audiences experience something before they encounter the sales message. That reaction might be amusement, curiosity, surprise, usefulness or recognition.
Leave Enough Space for Curiosity
Do not explain everything immediately. A well-designed information gap can encourage people to continue watching or searching, provided the eventual answer rewards the effort.
Give People Something Worth Sharing
Ask what the audience gains by passing the campaign on. Does it make them look informed, funny, helpful, culturally aware or early to something interesting?
Make the Idea Easy to Retell
If the campaign requires three paragraphs of explanation before it becomes interesting, word of mouth becomes harder. Strong ideas often survive compression.
Use Participation Where It Adds Meaning
Interaction should help audiences experience the product, understand the idea or contribute to the story rather than functioning as an empty engagement device.
Build Campaigns Around Recognisable Brand Assets
Characters, phrases, visual systems and established brand behaviour give audiences a familiar framework that makes new campaigns easier to understand and discuss.
Connect Attention Back to the Business
Views and conversation are intermediate outcomes. The campaign still needs to strengthen brand memory, product understanding, consideration or another commercially relevant behaviour.
The Best Campaigns Give People a Reason to Carry Them Forward
Marketers cannot command word of mouth.
They can buy reach, increase frequency and improve the odds that more people encounter an idea, but the decision to continue the conversation belongs to the audience.
That is why the psychology behind successful campaigns deserves as much attention as the media plan surrounding them.
People share what surprises them, moves them, helps them, reflects something about who they are or gives them a story worth telling. They participate when the experience feels rewarding, and they remember brands more easily when the creative idea and the commercial message reinforce each other.
The most talked-about campaigns understand that advertising no longer ends when the audience sees it. The more important question is what the audience wants to do with it afterwards.
A brand can start the campaign. It becomes a cultural conversation only when people find their own reason to carry it forward.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is marketing psychology?
Marketing psychology applies principles from psychology and consumer behaviour to understand how people notice, interpret, remember and respond to brands, advertisements and commercial messages.
Why do some marketing campaigns go viral?
Campaigns can spread when they create strong emotional arousal, curiosity, surprise, social value or participation. Distribution platforms increase reach, but psychological motivation often influences whether people choose to share the content.
What role does emotion play in viral marketing?
Research suggests that high-arousal emotions such as awe, excitement, anger and anxiety can encourage sharing more strongly than lower-arousal emotions. The effect is influenced by context and does not mean that stronger emotion always produces better marketing outcomes.
How does curiosity help marketing campaigns?
Curiosity can arise when people recognise a gap between what they know and what they want to know. Campaigns can use that gap to encourage further attention, provided the eventual reveal delivers a satisfying and relevant answer.
Does controversy make a campaign more successful?
Not necessarily. Research suggests that moderate controversy can increase interest and conversation, but excessive controversy can create discomfort and reduce willingness to discuss the subject.
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