What is Guerrilla Marketing?

What is Guerrilla Marketing?

Guerrilla Marketing is an unconventional and creative marketing strategy that focuses on using low-cost, high-impact tactics to promote a product, service, or brand. It’s designed to grab attention in public places, surprise people, and generate buzz—often relying more on imagination and timing than a big advertising budget.

Guerrilla Marketing is an advertising strategy that focuses on low-cost unconventional marketing tactics that yield maximum results.

The term Guerilla Marketing was coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his book ‘Guerrilla Advertising’ in 1984. It was inspired by guerrilla warfare which is an irregular warfare and relates to the small tactic strategies used by armed civilians. Many of them include ambushes, sabotage, raids and elements of surprise.

Guerrilla marketing is about taking the consumer by surprise, make an unreadable impression and create ample amount of social buzz. Guerrilla marketing is said to make a far more valuable impression with consumers in comparison to more traditional forms of advertising and marketing.

This is due to the fact that most Guerrilla marketing campaigns aim to strike the consumer at a more personal and memorable level. Guerrilla marketing is often ideal for small businesses that need to reach a large audience without breaking the bank. It is also used by big companies in grassroots campaigns to complement ongoing mass media campaigns.

Instead of asking that you invest money, Guerrilla marketing suggests you invest time, energy, imagination and knowledge instead. It puts profits, not sales, as the main yardstick. It urges that you grow geometrically by enlarging the size of each transaction, having more transactions per year with each customer and tapping the enormous referral power of current customers.

Guerrilla marketing advocates fervid follow-up, cooperation instead of competition, “you” marketing rather than “me” marketing, dialogues instead of monologues, counting relationships instead of counting sales and aiming at individuals instead of groups. The Guerrillas realize that the process of marketing is very much akin to the process of agriculture. Their marketing plans are the seeds they plant. Their marketing activities are the nourishment they give to each plant. Their profits are the harvest they reap. They know that profits don’t come in a short time.

Basic Principles of Guerrilla Marketing

Pursuing the analogy with Mao-Tse Tung’s Guerrilla warfare tactics seven rules can be identified which illustrate the principles on which Guerrilla marketing relies. These are:

• Concentrate your resources (time, place, and topic) to achieve temporary superiority.
  
  
• Sell the ideology along with the product, not the product alone.
  
  
• Identify established patterns, analyze them and overcome these patterns.
  
  
• Search for synergies.
  
  
• Try to outsmart any perception filters established in your target group.
  
  
• Do not go the direct way; try to find the detours offering alternatives.
  
  
• Be flexible and agile instead of building strongholds.

Looking at these rules, one can find several aspects that are not far from the “standard” marketing strategies. Some aspects, however, have completely different approaches. Guerrilla marketing is based on marketing the implicit attributes of products or services rather than their explicit, functional aspects. Rather than introducing the product itself, by introducing the idea that comes with it, it addresses the emotional ideology bound up with the product. This is done with the superiority of attention obtained at least in the very moment of communicating.

Thus, Guerrilla marketing tries to target the emotional aspects of a buying decision by differentiating a product on an ideological level rather than a functional level.

There are a number of key principles that characterise Guerrilla marketing.

• Networks: business should constantly look to make contacts and build relationships.
  
  
• Energy: remember that every contact and every day is an opportunity to market your company. This is called 360-degree marketing.
  
  
• Activity: be aware that there are always opportunities to make your product known and find ways of doing this when the opportunity arises.
  
  
• Presence: find ways to make your business known to the market. This could be through chat rooms, emails, forums, discussion boards, radio, magazines, street posters, and so on.
  
  
• Smart: make sure that you do not offend customers.

Differentiating Guerrilla Marketing from Traditional Marketing

Guerrilla marketing is marketing that is unconventional, non-traditional, not by-the-book and extremely flexible. Some of the factors that make it different from traditional marketing are:

• The usage of time, money and energy instead of only money.
  
  
• Use of the science of psychology, actual laws of human behavior not guesswork.
  
  
• Instead of being oriented to companies with limitless bank accounts, Guerrilla marketing is geared to small business.
  
  
• Guerrillas grow profitably and then maintain their focus instead of growing large and diversifying.
  
  
• Instead of encouraging you to advertise, Guerrilla marketing provides you with 100 different marketing weapons; advertising is only one of them. Instead of growing linearly by adding new customers, Guerrilla grow geometrically by enlarging the size of each transaction, generating more repeat sales, leaning upon the enormous referral power of customers and adding new customers.

Methods for Guerrilla Marketing

There is a list of some methods for Guerrilla marketing that can be used. These methods are:

• Product give-away, including free demonstration and consultation.
  
  
• Intrigue – generating mystery to engage customers.
  
  
• Peer marketing – bringing people with similar interests or ages together to build up interest in the product.
  
  
• SMS text and video messaging.
  
  
• Roach baiting and buzz marketing – using actors to behave as normal customers to create interest, controversy or curiosity in a product or service.
  
  
• Live commercials – using people to do live commercials in key places such as clubs and pubs.
  
  
• Bill stickers – an approach used to promote DJs and club events.

Guerrilla marketing encompasses marketing approaches such as buzz marketing, viral marketing and grass root marketing. Guerrilla marketing employs give-away and contests, special events and “happenings”, and street teams and other highly visible marketing teams.

The Guerrilla marketing approach is a low-cost, high impact form of marketing that stresses creativity and capitalizes on the immediacy of needs. It is an approach that is flexible and responsive to changing conditions and relies on a willingness to try many different approaches. Above all it is fun and attention catching. Also called extreme marketing or feet-on-the-street marketing, a Guerrilla campaign has no preset rules or boundaries.

Guerrilla marketing uses a combination of engaging vehicles including elements of public relations, advertising and marketing into an offensive promotion strategy to reach consumers through a variety of means. The element of surprise may be Guerrilla marketing’s greatest attribute.

Reasons to use Guerrilla Marketing

Guerrilla marketing techniques have been used by a number of brands both large and small, in different situations. A common reason to use Guerrilla marketing techniques is to find new way to communicate with consumers. Nike sought to communicate with consumers through instant messaging.

In a competition titled Speed Mob, pairs of participants were sent questions about new Nike products via instant messages; the first participant to answer the questions correctly progressed to the final round. Another reason to use Guerrilla marketing is to interact with an audience. In 2005, Burger King implemented a Guerrilla marketing campaign to increase sales by 25’K in Asian countries.

The campaign designed by Ogilvy Red Card, aimed to attract more consumers into Burger King’s restaurants. Some of the steps included “putting IBK on T-shirts and placing them on statues of Ronald McDonald, placing large footprints from McDonald’s to Burger King, and putting signs on empty benches that said ‘gone to BK – Ronald’.