Gerrilla marketing
Guerrilla marketing, as described by Jay Conrad Levinson in his popular 1984 book Guerrilla Marketing, is an unconventional way of performing promotional activities on a very low budget. Such promotions are sometimes designed so that the target audience is left unaware they have been marketed to and may therefore be a form of undercover marketing (also called stealth marketing). The ethics of guerrilla marketing have often been called into question due to an alleged deceptive, misleading, or subtle nature of the campaigns.[citation needed]
Example of guerrilla marketing in São Paulo, Brazil promoting the Hopi Hari amusement park.
It is up to the guerrilla marketer to be creative and devise unconventional methods of promotion. The marketer must use all of his or her contacts, both professional and personal, and must examine his company and its products, looking for sources of publicity. Many forms of publicity can be very inexpensive, others are free.
It is argued that when implementing guerrilla marketing tactics, small size is an advantage.[citation needed] Small businesses, according to this argument, are able to obtain publicity more easily than large companies; they are closer to their customers and considerably more agile.
Yet ultimately, according to Levinson, the Guerrilla Marketer must "deliver the goods". In The Guerrilla Marketing Handbook, he states: "In order to sell a product or a service, a company must establish a relationship with the customer. It must build trust and rapport. It must understand the customer's needs, and it must provide a product that delivers the promised benefits."
Levinson identifies the following principles as the foundation of guerrilla marketing:
- Guerrilla Marketing is specifically geared for the small business.
- It should be based on human psychology instead of experience, judgment, and guesswork.
- Instead of money, the primary investments of marketing should be time, energy, and imagination.
- The primary statistic to measure your business is the amount of profits, not sales.
- The marketer should also concentrate on how many new relationships are made each month.
- Create a standard of excellence with an acute focus instead of trying to diversify by offering allied products and services.
- Instead of concentrating on getting new customers, aim for more referrals, more transactions with existing customers, and larger transactions.
- Forget about the competition and concentrate more on cooperating with other businesses.
- Guerrilla Marketers should always use a combination of marketing methods for a campaign.
- Use current technology as a tool to empower your marketing.
While still used frequently by small businesses, Guerrilla Marketing has been used increasingly by fortune 500 companies, including General Electric, Yahoo!, Citigroup, Sony Ericsson and Nike.
