Guerilla Marketing

Guerilla Marketing

Guerilla marketing aims to achieve traditional marketing and advertising goals such as exposure, frequency, awareness and reaching out to consumers but by employing unconventional methods. The strategy of guerilla marketing is to target small and specialized customer groups in such a way that bigger companies would not find it worthwhile to retaliate. The word ‘guerilla’ stems from the concept of ‘guerilla’ warfare, which is a tactic whereby infantry divisions wait for their enemy and attack them by surprise instead of approaching the enemy line lacking subtlety and having little regard for fatality. Guerilla marketing can be as different from traditional marketing as guerilla warfare is from traditional warfare. Rather than marching their marketing dollars forth like infantry divisions, guerilla marketers snipe away with their marketing resources for maximum impact and minimal cost.

In marketing and strategic management, marketing warfare strategies use military metaphor to craft a businesses plan. Guerrilla marketing warfare strategies are designed to wear-down the enemy by a long series of minor attacks. Rather than engage in major battles, a guerrilla force is divided into small groups that selectively attacks the target at its weak points. To be effective, guerrilla teams must be able to hide between strikes. They can disappear into the remote countryside, or blend into the general population. The general form of the strategy is a sequence of attacking, retreating, and hiding, repeated multiple times in series. It has been said that “Guerrilla forces never win wars, but their adversaries often lose them”.

The term ‘guerilla marketing’ was first coined by businessman, Jay Conrad Levinson who proposed that “guerilla marketing is more about matching wits than matching budgets”. As described by Levinson in his book: Guerilla Marketing, the term simply refers to an unconventional way of performing marketing and promotional activities on an extremely low budget. Often these promotions are designed so that the targeted group is left unaware that they have been marketed to at all and may therefore be a form of ‘undercover marketing’. Levinson explains

that it is essentially up to the guerilla marketer themselves to be

creative and devise unique and unconventional ways to promote ones product or service. They must be willing to use all their contacts, professional and personal and must look inside their own company and within their own product for sources of publicity. Some forms of publicity in guerilla marketing are inexpensive while others are quite pricey.

Levinson has identified some principles to be followed as the foundation of guerilla marketing. Firstly, is it generally geared toward smaller businesses and should be based on human psychology rather than experience, judgment or statistics. Instead of pouring money into your marketing tactics, the primary investment of marketing should be time, energy and imagination. Companies should concentrate on how many new relationships are made each month as opposed to how many sales the company made. Instead of concentrating on new customers the company should aim to measure their improvement in more referrals, more transactions with existing customers as well as larger transactions. Above all, guerilla marketers should always use a combination of marketing methods for each campaign.

Although there are many unconventional marketing techniques, the following are a few examples: Word of mouth campaign, personal canvassing, telemarketing by all members of the firm, personal letters, advertisements in the Yellow Pages, personal meetings, ads in local community newspapers, billboards, truck and

automotive signs, stickers, flags and banners, t-shirts, matches, pens, and calendars. General characteristics of guerilla style tactics include marketing or promotional plans that are ‘off the beaten path’, jump out at you when you least suspect it (much like a guerilla warrior), typically cost less, allow the small-to-medium competitor to level the playing field while maintaining an edge against wealthy, well funded marketing ‘bullies’.

A redundant but successful tactic