What is guerrilla marketing?

Guerrilla marketing is a strategy that seeks to achieve optimal results at the lowest possible cost, using tactics based more on ingenuity and timing than on conventional “recipes”. The term was coined by marketer Jay C. Levinson in his book Guerrilla Marketing: Secrets for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business. Levinson was inspired by guerrilla warfare to suggest new advertising solutions to entrepreneurs, start-ups and small companies.

what does guerrilla marketing mean?

To understand what guerrilla marketing means, we have to connect with the metaphor of irregular warfare. In this sense, guerrilla marketing employs the surprise factor and takes advantage of circumstances to cause a positive reaction and attract customers.

In other words, we “ambush” our potential customers with eye-catching advertising in the least expected places and at the least expected times. This not only increases our acquisitions and conversions, but also sets us apart from individuals and companies that only use conventional marketing techniques.

Now that we know what guerrilla marketing is, we are in a position to address how it is put into practice.

what is guerrilla marketing?

To know how to do guerrilla marketing, we can break down this strategy by technique:

• Viral marketing: launching a message in any format (text, image, video, etc.) on social networks or on our website, so that it goes viral under its own weight.
• Environmental communication: placing advertising messages on elements of the everyday environment such as walls, poles, telephone booths, means of transport, etc.
• Ambush marketing: we can say that it is guerrilla marketing at its best, since it consists of advertising in events that do not directly sponsor our brand, as if we were ambushing the enemy.
• Microsites: inserting small pages with advertising content in blogs, online stores and other websites.
• Street marketing: street shows, flash mobs, flyer distribution, human statues, etc.

Although these are the best-known techniques, there are no limits to what can be done, let alone a manual for what works and what doesn’t. Experimentation and ingenuity here are vital. So let’s take a look at how to do guerrilla marketing with concrete examples.

Guerrilla marketing: successful examples

Analyzing guerrilla marketing in examples is the best way to inspire us to carry it out on our own. The most creative companies show us what guerrilla marketing really means when it involves ingenuity, timing and determination to achieve goals.

Coca-Cola’s Happiness Machines

In 2010, Coca-Cola launched a video called Happiness Machine. It showed a vending machine that, in addition to Coca-Cola, dispensed many other “wishes”. The most striking thing was the reaction of the people when they saw it (the video was filmed with hidden cameras). In a few weeks, Happiness Machine went viral with millions of views on YouTube, being particularly popular in Japan, Russia, Mexico and Brazil. So successful was it that Coca-Cola has released several sequels.

The highest parachute jump, by Red Bull

Red Bull emphasizes courage, challenge and adventure above all in its advertising campaigns. In 2012 it demonstrated this by getting Felix Baumgartner to jump from a hot air balloon in the stratosphere. In doing so, a world record was set for the highest skydiving jump: 128,100 feet. This feat garnered more than 8 million views on You Tube in a single day.

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