Coined by Jay Conrad Levinson, guerilla marketing is more about matching wits than matching budgets. 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. [1]http://www.marketingterms.com/dictionary/guerilla_marketing/ [1] http://www.isp-planet.com/marketing/2002/guerilla_takes_gorilla.html
[1] The 10 Commandments of Guerilla Marketing In 2003, guerilla marketing tactics and an increased emphasis on public relations will be important strategies for cost-conscious marketers in the business markets. But before you begin, make sure you spend your time and dollars most effectively. Start with the 10 Commandments of Guerilla Marketing ... Know your market. Know who your customers are, how they think, and where they go. You can waste a lot of time and money going to the wrong events or advertising in the wrong publications. Understand whom you're selling to - industry, size of company, job function, related equipment, etc. Once you've defined your customer, focus your marketing efforts on reaching those prospects directly or through a related network of contacts. Keep your name in front of your in-house list. Before you stray too far in your marketing program, make sure you're in regular contact with your in-house list of prospects. Your highest conversion to sales will come from this list of people who've already expressed an interest in your product. Send a regular series of electronic or snail mails to the list to keep your name in the forefront of your prospects' minds and to keep the list fresh and up-to-date. Work with the press. Nothing is more credible than a mention in a respected industry publication. Work with editors to get what is essentially free space. Send newsworthy announcements about your company's new products or business deals at least once a month. Note the use of the word "newsworthy" - there's nothing editors hate more than irrelevant or recycled material. Educate the market. Place articles in industry magazines. Start with case histories about customers who have successfully applied new methods to their operations (and just happen to use your products or services!). Develop technology articles and white papers to educate potential customers about your segment of the industry and any special innovations you've created along the way. Put e-marketing to work for you. One of the most effective marketing devices these days is the e-newsletter. Mailed monthly, this marketing tool can generate response rates of up to 40%, if written with the customer in mind. Don't just pitch your products, though. Educate the customer on related technology and other industry issues. Push prospects to your Web site for further information and use special tracking URLs to measure the effectiveness of each issue. Do the Web right. Today's technical professional is under a great amount of stress to do more, faster. To make this happen, they are scouring the Internet for the products and services they need to do their jobs better. As a result, nothing's worse for a sales and marketing program than a Web site that looks like it was put together in your next door neighbor's garage. Start by analyzing the 4Cs of good Web site development - Creative, Content, Clarity, and Communications. Creative: Does your Web site reflect a professional look and feel? If not, your prospects won't take you seriously. Content: Have you filled the site with lots of technical content, both product information and tutorials? Have you created a complete set of pre- and post-sales FAQs? If not, your customers will not be able to get the info they need to make a purchase decision. Clarity: Is it easy for the prospect to find the information they need? Can they get to everything within three mouse clicks? If not, they'll go to your competitor. Communications - Have you taken advantage of the interactive nature of the Internet or are you just posting text? If not, you've lost an opportunity to more directly engage your prospects. Get a prime spot on the Web's search engines. Banners and text-based advertising on the top search engines can result in a large increase in traffic to your Web site. If you're selling to techies, look at Google, AltaVista, and Yahoo. If you're on a tight budget, employ a Search Engine Optimization service to fine-tune your Web site's ranking in the search results. Postcards supplement an existing marketing program and are stress-free. In the days of the post-anthrax scare, postcards are a safer and lower stress approach to direct mail. Mail postcards with special promotions or contests that will entice your prospect to further explore your Web site or call for additional information on a product. One of our clients had a 30% response to a postcard that featured a crossword puzzle geared specifically to design engineers. Give talks and presentations at industry association meetings and conferences. Virtually all professionals belong to at least one organization that helps them sharpen their technical skills. Attend annual conferences. Respond to Calls for Papers to get on the speaking circuit. Don't forget to work with local branches of large organizations, as well as at the national level. Network, network, network. Often the best way to reach prospects is through other people or organizations that work with them on a regular basis. If you're trying to reach CEOs, consider making friends with bankers, lawyers, and venture capitalists. If you're looking to reach IT managers, buddy up with networking and communications vendors.Sounds simple enough, right? Actually, the devil is in the details. To develop your knock-out Guerilla Marketing plan for 2003, call +91 40 55827718 or request a quote. [1] http://www.zezan.com/guerillamarketing.html
Blair Witch Project [1] With the glut of advertising targeted at kids these days and the multiple media channels delivering messages to them, campaigns that come off as out of the ordinary, more honest or more relevant are a necessity. That's driving kid companies to look to fresh tactics. Enter the new trend toward guerilla marketing, or any marketing that uses aggressive, unusual tactics to reach consumers. Despite the trend, many kids companies still treat guerilla marketing as an ancillary strategy, designed to supplement more traditional tools like TV spots and print ads with aggressive, alternative campaigns. But there's no denying the concept, which first evolved decades ago, is blossoming. Why the sudden popularity? "It's a huge trend to be individualistic, to make it look like [kids] have found you. You can't do that too well with traditional advertising," says Baysie Wightman, VP at ad agency Mullen, and a pioneer in guerilla marketing with kids who has worked on brands like Reebok. Plus, new technologies like the Web enable companies to be in touch with kids in ways they never have before, says Sid Good, president of kids marketing firm Good Marketing. More agencies are incorporating guerilla techniques into their repertoires in order to position themselves as full-service firms, Good says. Talking to Kids, Through Kids Recruiting kids to conduct grassroots campaigns targeting their peers is becoming the guerilla technique of choice for many youth marketers. Peer-to- peer marketing offers companies an important advantage: kids are more likely to respond to a message from friends than to a TV ad. Kibu, a new Web site targeted at teen girls, put the strategy to use in its launch marketing this Spring. "Peer-to-peer marketing is key to Kibu," says Leigh Bakun, director of grassroots advertising. "Our girls went out and took the approach of a new friend sharing information. They were not just coating events with freebies. They were establishing a great two-way dialogue about the site." Kibu hired local teens in 10 cities since they were sure to know the cool teen spots. In addition to chatting with girls and sharing information, the teams handed out lip gloss, stickers, tea bags and incense. And when they were done at each hot spot, they left their mark - Kibu provided chalk for the girls to write Kibu words like "divasphere." The teams enjoyed it so much they engaged in friendly rivalry to see who could create the most chalk impressions - a bonus for Kibu, since the girls' competitive spirit resulted in more than 1,000 chalk masterpieces in the 10 markets. While Kibu won't disclose site traffic, the qualitative results from the grassroots campaign have been spectacular. One girl's reaction after meeting Kibu teens in Washington: "I think that was a really good way to try to get more personal with people when the Internet can be such a inpersonal [sic] thing. So keep up with the human interaction advertising! And I love your Web site!" Becoming a Grassroots Guru Grassroots advertising can be less expensive than buying TV time or other traditional marketing methods, but what marketers save in dollars, they make up for in manpower. "We looked at the street teams as ambassadors for the brand. The selection process is very important," says Bakun. Advice from the experts: Sell yourself to attract the best kids. "Any good marketing company needs to know how to market itself to attract people," says Ron Vos, president of Hi Frequency Marketing, a firm that Vos refers to as "the Howard Stern" of youth marketing. Vos specializes in edgy guerilla marketing tactics aimed at teens and young adults, and says campaigns that use kids as marketers require a lot of effort on the recruiting end. Develop a thorough screening process. Hi Frequency gets around 350 applicants a week, and of those it hires only three to five. "You have to be smart and selective," says Mullen's Wightman. "In junior high you knew the cool kids. You have to find the kids who continually get [the trends] first." "Profile them on their purchasing experiences," Vos agrees. "What venues do they go to, what sort of entertainment are they into? Are they really on the edge of pop culture or just following trends?" Train, train, train. "Realize it takes a lot of money, manpower and people who are knowledgeable in training others in marketing. We teach kids marketing from the ground up. The tone we set now will have an impact on their careers in years to come," Vos says. Kibu trained its teams for weeks before they hit the streets. Be sure kids understand your messages, how to handle sticky situations and what their responsibilities are. Keep your teams happy. These aren't full-time employees, and it's important to offer them incentives to keep doing what they're doing with enthusiasm. Vos, whose clients are largely members of the music community, offers free tickets and other high-value tchatchkis. Hit the hot spots. Building a fabulous team won't do much good if they're talking to the wrong audience. Asking team members to suggest popular local hangouts is an important tactic, and Wightman recommends networking with teen salespeople in shops selling popular items. (Good Marketing: Sid Good, 216/721-1440; Hi Frequency: Ron Vos, 919/942-9244; Kibu: Leigh Bakun, 650/556-7500; Mullen: Baysie Wightman, 978/468-5111) Guerilla Tactics Grassroots peer-to-peer marketing is gaining momentum, but it's not the only guerilla strategy catching on. Blair Witchcraft The "Blair Witch Project" is the quintessential example of high-tech guerilla marketing, according to Sid Good. Promoters of the film developed a Web site with a trumped-up tale of junior college filmmakers who disappeared in the Maryland woods while documenting a legendary witch. Teens spread the tale by word of mouth, and rumors about the film and the Web site circulated furiously, generating enough hype to propel the micro- budgeted film to cult status and more than $250 million in revenues. The modern legend persists, and Parachute Publishing and Bantam Books recently announced they will launch an original fiction series inspired by "Blair Witch" this Summer. Artisan will release a sequel in Fall 2000. (Artisan: Paul Pflug, 212/386-6879; Parachute: Susan Knopf, 212/337- 6741; Bantam: Judith Haut, 212/782-8626) Driving Sales Info Gram, a video game company, is launching "Driver 2" this November with a campaign designed for shock value. Hi Frequency Marketing is working with graffiti artists to create messages on wrecked vehicles which will be towed through urban areas. There will be 20 of the recycled wrecks in New York alone. In cases like these, guerilla marketing can be just as costly, if not more so, than a traditional campaign. But (pardon the crash symbolism - we couldn't resist), they promise plenty of bang for your buck. (Hi Frequency: Ron Vos, 919/942-9244) COPYRIGHT 2000 Phillips Publishing International, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group [1] http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FVE/is_12_5/ai_63061452 _________________________________-- [1] Times Square was awash in young adults adorned with temporary tattoos emblazoned on their foreheads advertising Toyota's Scion and its latest model, the tC coupe. Here's an excerpt from AdAge.com : The one-day effort is the brainchild of guerilla marketing firm Cunning, a London-based operation that opened in New York late last year. Cunning recruited approximately 40 young adults, mostly college students, to publicize the Scion message on behalf of client Toyota Motor Sales USA's Toyota division. The auto marketer is unveiling its tC sports coupe today at the New York Auto Show at the Jacob Javits Center. "This is the first time we've used foreheads," said Brian Bolain, national manager for Scion. The automaker has deployed nontraditional efforts only, developed by its ad agency, Attik of San Francisco, to launch the youth-oriented Scion's initial two models, the xA and the xB. Sales of the latter began last June in California and rolled out in the South, Southeast and East in February. Despite the fact I think the model above is ugly as sin, Scion expects to sell 60,000 vehicles this year and 100,000 in 2005. The guerilla marketing tattoos are a one-time only effort, for now. Said Scion: "We'll see how it works and take it from there."
Information Viral marketing depends on a high pass-along rate from person to person. If a large percentage of recipients forward something to a large number of friends, the overall growth snowballs very quickly. If the pass-along numbers get too low, the overall growth quickly fizzles. At the height of B2C it seemed as if every startup had a viral component to its strategy, or at least claimed to have one. However, relatively few marketing viruses achieve success on a scale similar to Hotmail, widely cited as the first example of viral marketing.
[1] From a recent Time magazine article, Daniel Eisenberg says, “In an age of rising media saturation and sinking corporate credibility, the theory is that marketing is most effective when you don’t know that it’s marketing.” That’s why many companies are engaging in alternative or guerrilla marketing that ranges from handing out free samples to sponsoring concerts or other events. London’s Cake Creative Consultancy filled sidewalk trashcans and pub tables in Newcastle, England with empty cans of Red Bull a few years ago to spread the word to consumers that this is a hot drink. It was most successful in introducing this new product and it was done without people even spreading the word. Another concept is virus marketing. Seth Godin wrote a book about it. The concept is easy – get your core listeners (P1s) to spread the word to their friends and acquaintances. Reward them for bringing more people to your database marketing effort. DMR did a P1 study and found that it takes six P2s and 22 P3s to equal one P1. Certainly it makes more sense to bond with your P1s and use them to take your station to the potential listeners than chasing casual listeners with traditional marketing. [2]Operating in thirty cities across the United States and Canada, Big Phat Promotions has attracted a lot of media attention for leading this contested trend of marketing. The company defends their tactics as "spontaneous" and "virile" approaches to product promotion. Media critics however, argue that paying actors to engage unsuspecting targets in "friendly" encounters is unethical. According to a recent article, "Are You For Real" in the Montreal-based publication Massoneuve, the media isn't the only one who has a beef with Big Phat. The article reported that although Big Phat's lack of disclosure is raising issues with the Canadian Competition Bureau and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, they haven't been able to charge Big Phat with anything other than bad taste. Meanwhile, company President, John Ressler, continues to guarantee his events to be "absolutely invisible". Aside from the potential legal issues, unethical stealth marketing can be bad for business in general. McCarron warns that if advertising becomes so sneaky that it is unrecognizable from the everyday experiences of defenseless consumers, it will damage corporate credibility and the resulting state of distrust could have an extremely negative effect on social interaction. __________________ [3] Sony-Ericsson is selling cellular telephones here with a large billboard and with herds of yellow cabs with rooftop signs. And they are selling the gadgets with Tom and Heather. Tom Sellwood, 24, is a handsome, clean-cut British actor who arrives with a backpack and his Sony-Ericsson cellular telephone. It's one of the new ones with a digital camera attachment, which takes pictures and stores them. Sellwood loves acting and the theater but he hates being called a salesman. Heather Lane, a pretty 19-year-old singer and actress who works as his partner agrees. "I wouldn't call it [being] a salesperson," she says. "We're not pushing anything on anybody." And then the pitch begins. Sellwood asks a Times Square passersby a favor: "Would you take a picture of me and my girlfriend?" Almost everyone does. On the new Sony-Ericsson cellular phone with the digital camera attachment. "Don't know how?" Sellwood asks, demonstrating how it works. "It's easy. Look. Just push this button. This is so sweet. I just got it." The recipients of the pitch become intrigued with the latest gadget in communications. Told later that Sellwood and Lane are actors and not actually tourists, some of the subjects are amused with the pitch. Word-of-Mouth Proves to Be Effective "It's a little deceiving. But I guess it's a good way to get your point across in a populated area like this," says Ryan Hill, from Windsor, Ontario. John Maron, Sony-Ericsson's director of marketing, couldn't agree more. "It's not just a typical phone that makes a phone call anymore," he says. "It does a whole lot more. And how do you explain that in a magazine ad?" The concept is called "viral marketing," or spreading the word about a product by word of mouth, like a virus. More and more companies are using viral marketing to try to get to hard to reach customers. And for the most part they say it works. "The feedback so far has been overwhelmingly positive," Maron says. But Maron hasn't been listening to Gary Ruskin, who is the executive director of Commercial Alert, an advertising monitoring agency created by consumer advocate Ralph Nader. "First, it's deceptive," Rushkin says. "People think these are tourists but really they are corporate shills. Second, it's intrusive. It's like telemarketing in your face." Ruskin is concerned that this form of marketing will become the norm as companies find it harder and harder to reach their markets. Is It Intrusive, Ethical? "It's absolutely unethical to deceive people like this," he says. "In addition, it's taking advantage of the kindness of strangers and that's pretty low." The pitch does not just happen on street corners. In the evening, it migrates to the nightclubs. Guastavino's, an upscale club on Manhattan's East Side, was where Sarah Baker, 23, and Lisa Dery, 28, are having a drink at the bar and starting conversations about Sony-Ericsson cellular phones. In just a minute, they are surrounded by men who are curious. And then the phones come out. Is this any way to sell a product? Sony-Ericsson's Maron says his actors will "identify themselves if actually asked if they work for the company." Back at Times Square, a young man from Connecticut named John Demaio was surprised when he learned the good-looking couple with the fancy phone were actors. "I feel violated," he says. "I mean I had a connection between the two people and then to find out that they're salesmen." For the most part, people interviewed laughed and thought the viral marketing approach was an innovative way to sell a product. Sony-Ericsson reports positive feedback since the campaign started. But the next time some nice couple wants you to take their picture, remember: The person with the camera may be a lot less than candid. [1] http://www.mcvaymedia.com/rock/03/stealthmarketing.htm [2] http://www.galtglobalreview.com/business/buyer_beware.html [3] http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/DailyNews/stealth_marketing020822.html
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