The first principle of guerrilla marketing warfare is to “abandon conventional military tactics.” In doing so, the strategy favours the element of surprise and lends a competitive advantage to those willing to think outside of the box.
The same goes for guerrilla marketers. The key to making your brand stand out from the rest is unconventional and out-of-the-box tactics. The main advantage of guerrilla marketing is that it’s unexpected. It catches us off guard and causes an emotional response, whether its laughter, shock or sadness.
Here’s the low-down on just a few of them:
Ambient marketing is an off-shoot of guerrilla marketing that allows a business to create brand recognition without blatantly pushing their products. One example is the Dancing Grass Vans of London. Owned by renegade smoothie makers Innocent, the vans were covered in real grass and could be seen around the city making deliveries.
The vans served a real purpose, whilst promoting the Innocent brand. Moo!
Presence marketing is about using guerrilla marketing to make your brand visible at every given opportunity.
You know that saying, “out of sight, out of mind?” It goes double for products that don’t maintain a constant presence. This can be achieved through product placement in TV shows, stalls at local festivals, via regular Twitter updates, or any other way you can think of to grab (and maintain) consumers’ attention.
Grassroots marketing: can take on many forms, but for the most part is about winning customers over one-by-one rather than on a large scale. Some grassroots guerrilla marketing campaigns have elements of presence marketing, like posting on message boards relevant to your business. A successful grassroots campaign is all about building relationships and emphasising the personal connection, rather than broadcasting your message and hoping potential customers are listening.
Undercover marketing: is any marketing strategy that advertises a product to people without them knowing they are being marketed to. The purpose of stealth marketing is not to generate immediate sales, but to create interest that will make consumers more receptive to direct advertising later.
An example is Sony Ericsson’s campaign for the T68i, which was one of the most feature-rich mobile phones at the time (2001). Before releasing it, Sony Ericsson hired actors to pretend to be tourists, and ask strangers to take pictures of them with the T68i. They hoped that their undercover campaign would get people talking about the novel technology before the company launched other forms of advertising for the phone.
Hotcow is a non-traditional creative agency that specialises in experiential marketing that goes viral. Our campaigns generate buzz through crowd participation, PR and content sharing. Contact us on 0207 5030442 or email us on info@hotcow.co.uk.
