The TikTok Effect
By: Kristin Merrilees
Tags: Marketing, Gen Z, Branding, Teens, Social Media

The TikTok Effect

Who needs advertising when you can just go viral on TikTok?

Advertising is a big business. From newspaper and magazine ads, to partnerships with celebrities and influencers, to television commercials, to product placements, to internet ads, companies are always looking for ways to get people to buy their products — to have their products “go viral,” so to speak.

But in 2020, you don’t even need these kinds of advertising for your product to go viral. You just need someone to make a TikTok about it.

In the past year or so, several products have seen growth in sales due to going viral on TikTok — many even sold out in stores because of it. These are the kind of products that will lead people to state, “TikTok made me buy it.”

One of the oldest examples is multicolor LED lights, which became popular late last year. Many viewed their favorite TikTokers create videos from their bedrooms and saw these lights in the background — and just knew they had to have them.

This also spawned a bunch of accounts completely dedicated to showing people how to use the lights and different colors that could be made with them. They became so popular that they started being listed as “TikTok lights” online.

TikTok can also skyrocket the popularity of different clothing items. For example, earlier this year, people started making TikToks of themselves making custom tie-dye sweatsuits at home, using sweats they bought from Walmart. While this was also influenced by social distancing/quarantine, this trend’s explosive growth was no doubt significantly fueled by TikTok.

Or sometimes a product will become popular simply because it has a fun quirk or can be used in a TikTok trend. One example of this is when people started filming videos biting into Martinelli’s apple juice containers, claiming that it sounded like biting into an apple. Many were intrigued but still skeptical, and wanted to see if this was true for themselves:

Another more recent example involves a dinosaur light, which has a cool effect when used with a certain sound (watch below):

Or even take the case of Ana Coto, who posted a roller-skating video that got over 13.5 million views.

After she posted this, many were inspired to buy their own pairs of roller skates — according to NBC writer Kalhan Rosenblatt, popular brands such as Impala Rollerskates experienced increased sales, and the term “roller skate” even spiked in interest on Google Trends.

Other products that have gone viral on TikTok include various makeup products, pink cowboy hats, HIMI Gouache painting sets, Touchland hand sanitizers, and more.

Ultimately, when a brand or product goes viral on TikTok, it provides great advertising as well as the bragging rights of having been approved by the platform’s users, which are typically young and “trendy.” This kind of natural word-of-mouth (but hyper-accelerated due to the internet) sharing provides a kind of authentic curiosity and consumer demand that traditional advertising might struggle to produce. It can especially help fuel the success of small brands and businesses that wouldn’t have the resources for large-scale advertising. A few small brands I’ve come across that have gained success on TikTok are @/glossyhutcosmetics and @/discostickers.

However, not everyone is thrilled about brands achieving virality on TikTok — the brands’ loyal and longtime customers, for example, who don’t like that the products they are used to buying regularly are now sold out. Thus some will encourage others not to post about these products, which can then also lead to accusations of gatekeeping.

On TikTok, what is considered “cool” and “trendy” and what is “mainstream” or “old” is constantly changing. I think it is no different when it comes to products/brands that are being shared on the app — while bigger, hyped-up brands may have more followers, shares, and sales than their smaller counterparts, on the internet, virality can very easily turn into irrelevancy (VSCO girl trend, anyone?).