Marketing, Gangnam Style

    the song intentionally lacked a copyright so 
    that people would be encouraged to create their 
    own online parodies

Do they have a citation for this? I can't find anything.

    "Gangnam Style" actually pokes fun at how 
    the common man fantasizes about life in the fast lane

Whether that was his intention or not originally he has since claimed "GS is not a critique, just FUN!" [1]

    Make your product or brand more ownable

I mean, that can't hurt, I guess... but Old Spice was SO VIRAL and how much of that spread was because made their own Old Spice adverts? Very few people did until way after the phenomenon was HUGE... so I mean yeah, it worked in THIS case but it isn't what made GS viral... it was just a bonus that will involve more people in the "fad". From the parodies I've seen they are riding on the GS wave, not boosting GS itself, although I've only seen a few ("Eton Style", "Minecraft Style") are there any more I've missed that are popular?

    A great example is Oreo Cookies' Daily Twist campaign 

I spend most of my time on the internet, I saw Gangnam Style when it had a few million views and yet I've never heard of this... on that note viral marketing that allows people to "create their own" video are a dime a dozen. If anything they should be arguing for ORGANIC creation. Look at a game like Minecraft, there is 0 ability to share your stuff "officially" so people went to Youtube and created a hundred million dollar business. A game called Happy Wheels: same deal. The majority of "create your own" campaigns try to create some sort of "click click submit" experience where your creation ends up in the submission void, force people to share their work for it to matter to anyone!

It's counter intuitive to try and make it more difficult for people to share, but if you're providing something good (although I guess that's a side issue of most of these campaigns provide no real value to consumers) they will go out of their way to share it. If someone has to put in effort to upload a video of something they made they're sure as hell going to promote it as hard as they can.

    Psy's crowdsourcing strategy was limited to just the dance community

I might be missing some concious effort made by Psy that he's spoken about (any citations?) but isn't this what a large number of musicians do? They get other famous people onboard with their music videos because then you have their audience involved too! This has been done since the dawn of time, it's not a lesson to learn from GS unless you've never seen a music video before.

    Find an uncommonly-common emotional denominator 
    that resonates across cultures.

what does this even mean? He made a super catchy song with an AWESOME dance that everyone loves... he didn't... I'm confused.

There's definitely things to learn from Gangnam Style but I think this post is just looking for things to write about and not necessarily things that are mind blowing "whoa!" moments.

Does anyone happen to have any good anlysis pieces about Gangnam Style? There's been a few that cover Psy's history but none that seem to really talk about why it's so popular -- if there is a reason beyond everyone loves it 'cause it's catchy and humans aren't exactly predictable.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/120oqd/i_am_south_kore...

(also this post reads quite negative, it didn't start out to be but I guess that's how it ended up. sorry!)

I like the song because it's a catchy tune and that I understand a few words in English. If you can achieve success in anything besides music that catches on as well, it would be pretty amazing. Does anyone have anything else marketing-wise that in comparison that could be as catchy?

I think the meta discussion of interest here, is how even HBR are choosing to cash in on the popularity of the song with this article which is, let's face it, fairly thin on researched academic business substance.