Guerrilla marketing may be defined as an unconventional form of marketing, due to its low cost and uncommon ways to get to the market. Its goal is getting the maximum exposure for a certain item at the least cost. Less cost doesn’t mean less effort. On the contrary, guerrilla marketing often involves innovative, creative, intelligent solutions and it perfectly follows the famous catchphrase: “Work smarter, not harder”.
Conventional marketing strategies are the most often choice when the budget for it is large enough. But, what happens when there is not enough money to promote the product? Jay Conrad Levinson, the starter of this idea and the inventor of the name ‘guerrilla marketing’ is the first one to promote nontraditional, low cost marketing possibilities.
In the beginning, it was more suited for small businesses with needs for local advertising, rather than big national or international companies. That has changed and today many great corporations use the advantages of this type of marketing. It feels more natural, more personal; people react to it better than to the classic forms of advertising.
Examples of big companies doing guerrilla marketing are available everywhere: product giveaways on the streets, flash mobs, ‘controversial’ material not available on the TV, social media marketing. Internet has moved creativity to a new level. There are so many possibilities to be creative and have an advertising campaign that will reach many people, that old fashioned marketing becomes almost redundant. After all, people are showing less and less responsiveness to the commercials on the TV and billboards and guerrilla marketing is often not the choice, but what a company absolutely needs in order to be noticed.
Is internet marketing the part of the guerrilla marketing? It depends. Internet marketing is a broad concept. Some parts of online marketing belong to the classic marketing forms, and some are more of a guerrilla marketing. For example, if one pays for a place for your advertisement, there is no real effort invested, no creativity, no thinking about reaching the target market, so it’s not guerrilla marketing. However, if a company creates an interactive website with useful blog, if it works on reaching people through social networks by, let’s say, creating interesting competitions, it can be an example of guerrilla marketing.
The concept of guerrilla marketing is constantly changing. There is not a precise recipe for creating a guerrilla campaign, all they have in common are some characteristics like uniqueness, innovation, creativity and low cost. The rest can be really anything.
