These days, going viral often means going wrong. Balenciaga faced a $25m lawsuit for their 2022 campaign featuring children holding teddy bears in bondage-style outfits. Burger King took heat for their “women belong in the kitchen” tweet. Dolce & Gabbana’s “DG Loves China” campaign led to serious financial and reputational damage.

According to Hootsuite, just 5 percent of social media content achieves viral status, and much of that for the wrong reasons. No wonder conversations around “going viral” have become increasingly negative.

So where does that leave brands? While chasing virality for the sake of it rarely pays off, creating a buzz around your content is still one of the most effective ways to boost brand awareness and consumer engagement. 

To help brands tread this delicate line, I developed the SPREAD framework — a tool grounded in social science research and refined through years of teaching in executive education and MBAs programmes at INSEAD. SPREAD empowers anyone to critically assess and optimise the viral potential of any content before it is released – from an email campaign to a TikTok video.

In a recent article published on Harvard Business Review, I outline the six dimensions of SPREAD and explain how brands can use this framework to engineer virality without sacrificing effectiveness or threatening their reputation. 

The six dimensions of SPREAD

1. Socially useful and sensitive

When content is both useful to others and emotionally resonant or thoughtful, people are more likely to share it.

Duolingo, for instance, used its viral owl mascot in 2024 to champion language equity. Through TikTok, it promoted multilingual literacy programmes, leading to over 800M views across user-generated videos and a 54 percent year-on-year increase in app downloads globally. 

Or consider Dove’s “Cost of Beauty” campaign, which spotlighted the impact of social media on youths’ mental health. The brand partnered with mental health organisations, leading to over 6.6 billion impressions in the US and a 5.5 percent increase in value sales. Its success came from giving people a way to signal their values while supporting a broader cause.

Ask yourself:

1. Does my content offer value for people to share — tips, advocacy, social signaling – that resonates with a broader discourse?

2. Will sharing this content reflect positively on the sender’s relationship with recipients (both existing followers and new viewers)?

3. Does this content ignore or trivialise current social sensitivities? 

2. 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. 

A bold example is Elf Beauty’s “So Many Dicks” 2024 campaign, which highlighted the overrepresentation of men named Richard, Rick or Dick on boards in the United States (vs. women or people from underrepresented groups). By leveraging cheeky humour 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 percent.

But provocation can backfire when it’s out of touch, like Pepsi’s 2017 ad featuring Kendall Jenner, which was pulled within 24 hours after backlash for using protest imagery to sell soda.

Ask yourself:

1. Does my content spark thought, debate or challenge the status quo?

2. How surprising or counterintuitive is the format or message of the content?

3. Does this content provoke in a way that feels gimmicky or offensive?

3. Replicable

Memes, challenges and remixes thrive because they give people a sense of ownership or participation. 

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 be able to participate. 

Ask yourself:

1. Can users easily remix or reproduce my content?

2. Does this content make users want to create their own version or engage with it actively?

3. Is the content too complex or polished to inspire user participation?

4. Emotional

Content that activates emotions, especially when it takes people on a journey through different feelings, is more likely to be shared. But it’s not just about intensity – emotions need to feel relevant to the moment.

Airbnb’s “Made Possible by Hosts” built emotional journeys through real stories of travellers reconnecting with loved ones. By tapping into nostalgia and reconnection after Covid-19, the series resonated deeply with audiences emerging from pandemic lockdowns. It resulted in a 15 percent increase in overall traffic in the third quarter of 2021 in countries where the campaign was run, compared to 2019. Six months into the campaign, Airbnb posted its highest ever profit, with net income up 280 percent year on-year to $834 million. 

Compare this to Peloton’s infamous “Christmas Gift” ad, where a man gives his partner an exercise bike. While meant to be heartfelt, it was widely seen as tone-deaf and sexist – a reminder that misreading emotional tone can backfire.

Ask yourself:

1. Does my content evoke strong emotional response (such as joy, sadness, awe)?

2. Does this content create an emotional rollercoaster (e.g. variations of positive and negative emotions)?

3. Is the emotion evoked relevant and aligned to the product being advertised or the aim of the campaign?

5. Ambiguous

Ambiguity sparks curiosity and fuels sharing. It works because people enjoy the process of decoding and sharing their theories.

Lego’s "Rebuild the World" campaign achieved this by using surreal, dream-like scenes that defied logic. The brand encouraged viewers to interpret it their own way, and saw a 14 percent 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. 

Ask yourself:

1. Does my content leave space for different interpretations or personal meaning?

2. How likely is it that people will discuss or debate what this content really means?

3. Do parts of the content trigger curiosity or leave unanswered questions?

6. Distributive

Finally and most importantly, content must be designed to travel. The best ideas work across platforms, formats and audiences as they are built to be remixed, reposted and reshaped.

For instance, the #DollyPartonChallenge – where users posted four versions of themselves for LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Tinder – spread widely because it invited replication across platforms. Similarly, Disney’s "#ShareYourEars" campaign encouraged sharing by inviting fans to post photos of themselves wearing Mickey Mouse ears to unlock a donation for the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

In the same vein, the 2023 Barbie movie marketing team developed memes, filters and visual “templates” 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. Distributive campaigns also use smart hashtags (#Barbiecore, #MadeWithAI), short-form cuts and influencer integrations that nudge audiences to pass it along.

Ask yourself:

1. Does the format make sharing effortless?

2. Is it easy to imagine people sharing or amplifying this content on different channels?

3. Does the message actively nudge recipients to share the content with others?

Bringing it all together

The idea isn’t to score high across all six dimensions. It’s a delicate balance: overdo all the dimensions, and you risk reputational damage; don’t do enough, and your campaign can fall flat. 

A great example is the global success of Fix Dessert Chocolatier’s Dubai chocolate, which hit nearly every viral trigger — from cultural relevance and emotional tension to mystery, surprise and shareability. As a result, it became one of the most searched chocolates globally, even surpassing “milk chocolate” and “dark chocolate.”

Looking ahead, the stakes are rising. Virality is no longer just about what people choose to share, but what intelligent systems decide to surface. As large language models (LLMs) increasingly filters social content, frameworks like SPREAD will become even more essential, helping brands craft content that connects, travels and stays true to their values.