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Guerrilla marketing

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Guerrilla marketing is an unconventional, creative strategy businesses use to promote their products or services. It takes many forms like ambient marketing, which uses physical spaces in public places for advertisements. Ambush marketing leverages events without directly associating with them to boost brand awareness[1]. Stealth marketing, on the other hand, promotes products or services in a secretive manner. Viral marketing[2] motivates individuals to share marketing messages, resulting in rapid growth, while buzz marketing sparks public conversation about a fire[6] to generate buzz.

Street marketing, a subtype of guerrilla marketing, uses non-traditional advertising[3] methods in public areas. This strategy includes distributing flyers, creating animations, and hosting roadshows. The goal is to reach a target audience, engage senses, generate intimacy, and establish trust.

Guerrilla marketing also integrates social media[4] platforms for online marketing strategies, which can go viral, offering global publicity[5]. This method’s impact is significant, with successful campaigns like Coca-Cola’s ‘Happiness Machine’ becoming globally recognized. This marketing approach’s success demonstrates the effectiveness of non-traditional, creative advertising.

Terms definitions
1. ↑ brand awareness. Brand awareness is a fundamental concept in marketing that refers to the level of familiarity consumers have with a particular brand. It plays a significant role in their purchasing decisions, affecting the sustainability and growth of a business. Brand awareness is divided into two types: brand recall, the ability of consumers to remember a brand from memory when prompted with a product category, and brand recognition, where consumers confirm their previous exposure to a brand. It is typically measured using surveys, recall tests, and other metrics such as brand association and salience. Advertising is a crucial tool in building brand awareness and converting consumer interest into sales. Notably, strong brand awareness can enhance brand equity, which is the cumulative value derived from a brand's name and logo, including factors like brand loyalty and perceived quality.
2. ↑ Viral marketing ( Viral marketing ) Viral marketing is a business strategy that uses social media networks to promote a product or service. It works like a virus, spreading from person to person through sharing and liking of content. The concept originated from the idea of ideas spreading like viruses and became popular in the 1990s. Viral marketing can take various forms including video clips, games, ebooks, and text messages. Key to its success is the use of influencers who help communicate marketing messages to their followers. Successful viral campaigns can greatly boost brand awareness, website traffic, customer engagement, and brand credibility. However, it's important to use the right influencers to avoid damaging the brand's reputation.
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Guerrilla marketing (Wikipedia)
For the Sri Lankan film, see Guerilla Marketing.

Guerrilla marketing is an advertisement strategy in which a company uses surprise and/or unconventional interactions in order to promote a product or service. It is a type of publicity. The term was popularized by Jay Conrad Levinson's 1984 book Guerrilla Marketing.

Ad sticker of a boxing studio in Germany. The message is ironic and can be regarded as "anti-typical" for advertisements, as it is basically negative.

Guerrilla marketing uses multiple techniques and practices in order to establish direct contact with potential customers. One of the goals of this interaction is to cause an emotional reaction in the clients, and the ultimate goal of marketing is to induce people to remember products or brands in a different way than they might have been accustomed to.

As traditional advertising media channels—such as print, radio, television, and direct mail—lose popularity, marketers and advertisers have felt compelled to find new strategies to convey their commercial messages to the consumer. Guerrilla marketing focuses on taking the consumer by surprise to make a dramatic impression about the product or brand. This in turn creates buzz about the product being marketed. It is a way of advertising that increases consumers' engagement with the product or service, and is designed to create a memorable experience. By creating a memorable experience, it also increases the likelihood that a consumer, or someone who interacted with the campaign, will tell their friends about the product. Thus, via word of mouth, the product or service being advertised reaches more people than initially anticipated.

Guerrilla marketing is relatively inexpensive, and focuses more on reach rather than frequency. For guerrilla campaigns to be successful, companies generally do not need to spend large amounts of money, but they need to have imagination, energy and time. Therefore, guerrilla marketing has the potential to be effective for small businesses, especially if they are competing against bigger companies.

The message to consumers is often designed to be clear and concise. This type of marketing also works on the unconscious mind, because purchasing decisions are often made by the unconscious mind. To keep the product or service in the unconscious mind requires repetition, so if a buzz is created around a product, and if it is shared amongst friends, then this mechanism enables repetition.

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