Introduction to Guerrilla Marketing

The concept has evolved from the ancient notion of Guerrilla warfare, where the troops used to attack the enemy in parts. When the purpose of branding (of a product/ or a service) is to target users at regular intervals, tada! it's guerrilla. The branding is done to make a place in user’s mind.

Guerrilla marketing is an effective and cheap way to target the customer. Many organisations consider traditional advertising options to be the best. But not everyone has the unlimited budget. You need to think outside the box to stay ahead of the competitors.

The concept was created by Jay Conrad Levinson in 1984 when he wrote the book ‘Guerrilla Marketing.

I came across this concept when i was working with the designers at Allurive. Well, Allurive is a user interface design agency in North India. Let me share the methodologies we discussed.

Point of Sale

A company can open their store at various places, like malls, event site, on street, trade fair and where not! By increasing the point of sale, more and more communication about a product can be done, even if the sale does not happen instantly, the concept can be delivered to the consumer's mind.

Free Samples

The mindset of the consumer gets aligned when something that they need is available for free, for some period of time. Giving away free samples can be more effective to reach the customer while making the sales next to the offers.

Consider the example of JIO launch in India. Numerous users enrolled into this network, as 4G data, calls, messages were available to the user for free.

Stickers

This is the most convenient and one of the cheapest way to promote the brand. The Stickers are provided to the customer along with the other products to communicate the branding. Let's consider JIO again. They give away the sticker along with the Sim card packets. And when a user uses the sticker, the product can be easily communicated to the nearby individual.

Content Creation (my personal favorite)

By creating valuable content, users can easily get the information about particular services and hence with other allied advertisement, the brand communication can take place. Here SEO also plays its role. Content creation should be keyword specific, so that when a user searches for specific keywords, the content gets ranked by the search engine.

LinkedIn (definitely)

The professional media, LinkedIn, has become an effective medium for business promotions. Many companies wisely choose Linkedin for sales and marketing purposes. Here, you can connect with your target specific customer and can even get in touch with them while promoting a brand. You can join a target group and post about your product on daily basis.

Creating Webinars

One can start with the free trails and test this concept to reach to the huge pool of audience. You can set up a login page where you can ask users to fill the details. There are various strategies through which you can bring the traffic to your webpage and once the user visit he fills the form and Bingo! You get the details from which you can contact that user.

Videos and Pictures

By designing creative pictures of your product, you can make user think twice about your product. A lot of communication can take place with just one picture. You can also create the videos related to your product (or service) in which you can communicate the users how their problems can be solved easily with your offerings.

Examples:

The Stanley Cup Ice Sculptures

2010 hockey season, in which the Chicago Blackhawks would be defending the title from the previous year, this is what happend on the first day ice sculptures of the Stanley Cup trophy appeared in various spots around the Windy City. Chicagoans took to social media, began spotting, photographing, and buzzing about the frozen replicas, all of them speculating about who could have pulled off such a cool trick. Finally, the Blackhawks took to Twitter to say the sculptures were in fact an effort of its marketing team.

The Carrie Coffee Shop

Watch the video here

I am sure you now agree that guerrilla marketing is one of the most effective modern ways to attract large number of audience. For those who want to explore more and think they can give these techniques a shot (or try their hand at it), I highly recommend you to read this book by J.C Levinson.

Hold on! I would like you to consider the following points as well

• the marketing strategy should be designed as per the location.
• creativity in the way of approaching customers should be taken care of
• the idea should be unique enough to attract the consumer’s attention.
• best idea and a particularly designed strategy should bind hands to achieve the marketing goals.
• the strategy of marketing should be in line with that of the marketing objective of the organisation.

Want to learn Guerrilla tactics? Get the Book.

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Happy Marketing!

And before i press that publish button, some more examples of guerrilla marketing where brands like Nestlé, McDonald’s used this effective method to display advertisements.