Agency Underground

Companies have always been looking for new way to promote their goods or services because competition is getting stronger and stronger. So if your do not want to lose your market share or lose profit you must look for new marketing tools to promote your goods.

Of course you can make use of traditional ways such advertising on TV and in newspapers. But the latest data show that they are not so effective because when people understand that somebody wants to talk them into buying something they will not want to buy your product. According to reports they most effective tool is to make use of Advertising gifts as an effective tool for promotion. These promotional gifts can be delivered everywhere, for example, in any supermarket or just in the street where there are a lot of people who are by the way your potential customers. Everybody feels happy when he gets something for free. When he likes the product he will tell others about it and even advertise it. Also there is no problem to find a Marketing product provider because a lot of companies offer such services. You can also print your company logo on it to promote it. So everything that you need is to order promotional items for your company and deliver them. Everything is simple.

History is filled with stories of the little guy overcoming the big tough army. Thus became guerilla warfare. The history of guerilla marketing in business is quite similar.

For example, Marlboro brand cigarettes were at the bottom of the industry before the introduction of the Marlboro Man. Once the Marlboro Man guerilla campaign was used for promotion, Marlboro brand cigarettes jumped to the number one spot in the industry.

You may be shocked to find out the number of well-known businesses struggled their way to the top. The history of the climb up the ladder made by these business icons is also the history of guerilla marketing.

Only a small number of people before the mid-80s knew guerilla marketing. The knowledge, which could be used to shoot their business to the top, was kept secret with respect to industry completion.

A man considered the most respected marketer on the planet, Jay Conrad Levinson, coined the term “guerilla marketing”. He upset the balance of power when he made the secrets of guerilla marketing available to the general public. He has published twenty-seven books on the subject in thirty-seven different languages. Jay Conrad Levinson’s books are required reading at many universities around the world.

You have spent lots and lots of your precious time designing and building the most amazing web site on the internet. The only problem is that no one knows a thing about it. The way online marketing works is by the volume of traffic that you generate to your web site. Without having people aware of your web site your traffic flow as well as your flow of income are somewhat nonexistent. So what is the best way to draw internet surfers to your web site?

The content that you have on your web site is a most important factor when you are in the process of design. If you have creative and unique content on you web page, you are more likely to draw in surfers who use search engines.

Search engine optimization may be the right direction for you to take on your journey of getting your web site out there grabbing surfers of the net. With SEO, keywords are used to target traffic on search engines and send them the direction of your web site.

Another fantastic way to introduce the World Wide Web to your unique new web site is through link building. You can use links from other web sites on the internet to increase the flow of traffic to your web site. This may be a way to turn a little profit as well.

Jay Conrad Levinson is known as the leading expert in the world when it comes to guerilla marketing. He along with the “original guerilla”, Steve Savage spoke at the marketing seminar held in Dubai Media City colorfully entitled “Guerilla Attack: The New Revolution in Marketing” on May 7th and 8th. The event took place at Dubai Knowledge Village Conference Center.

Jay Conrad Levinson is recognized by many around the globe as being the “Father of the Worldwide Marketing Revolution.” Here wrote the well-known book Guerilla Marketing which was published for the first time in the early eighties. Guerilla Marketing can mow be purchased in one of more than forty different languages. More than fourteen million copies of Guerilla Marketing have been sold all over the world.

Levinson is a pioneer in the world of marketing. With his state-of-the-art approach for the owners of the smaller sized businesses. Since several MBA programs at the university offer the subject of Guerilla Marketing, the seminar last week was an ideal opportunity for Levinson to be heard speaking on the lack of similarities between traditional marketing and guerilla marketing. The seminar was part of “Guru Talk”, a program that features workshops for corporate and individual businesses alike.

Guerilla Marketing, a little off-the-wall indeed, is one of the most creative types of marketing campaign around today. Guerilla marketing campaigns can be found just about anywhere, on the street, on the ground or even in the sky.

We all love billboards. An example of a creative approach to guerilla marketing is a cell phone sign that reads “HATE DROPPED CALLS?”, but the “CALLS” section of the sign lies underneath the sign, as if to have been “DROPPED”. Another is a balloon put to use in an ad for bubble gum. You can probably look up as you are driving down any major interstate or walking around a busy city and see lots of guerilla marketing campaigns on display up in the sky.

You may want to mind your step in the bigger cities, where the guerilla marketing campaigns can appear right under your feet. These campaigns incorporate present things in the environment to the campaign, such as manhole covers made to look like a hamburger grill or an uncovered manhole drawn into a picture of a wheelchair. Another form of urban guerilla marketing campaigns that is rapidly growing in popularity is street paintings. The artists can manipulate these paintings into many different optical illusions that are sure to drawn in your attention.

Guerilla marketing ads can more often than not be found at eye level where it will usually catch your attention every time. Everything is used from twisted light posts to promote the new blockbuster in theatres to a garage door that looks like aluminum foil.

The point of a marketing campaign is to draw your attention and grab your interest; urban guerilla marketing uses fresh and innovative ideas to accomplish this task.

An organisation in Australia, the Father Bob Maguire Foundation, concerns itself with issues of the homeless. Needing to highlight the plight of the homeless to a wider audience they turned to the new phenomena of Guerrilla Marketing. Guerrilla Marketing focuses on new techniques and methods of bringing a product or service to the attention of the general public. They came up with a neat solution to attract attention and promote thought in the target audience. They decorated trash cans on the street to look like dinner place settings by sticking a knife, fork, spoon and serviette onto the top of the trash can. This seemed to hit the mark perfectly, as people would associate the dinner place setting as unattainable to the homeless, who usually search trash cans for scraps of food. This to me is the acceptable face of a new industry already heading for controversy as more and more outlandish ideas are foisted onto the general public. In a further attempt to drive the message home they used the slogan “for the homeless, every day is a struggle. Donate today and help us feed the homeless”. This message along with the visual impact of the dinner place setting certainly created food for thought, and was generally considered a successful campaign.

A company manufacturing scale miniature model cars and trucks, otherwise known as Micro Machines, decided to broaden their marketing by making their products known to a wider audience. This wider audience was not limited to children and so a marketing campaign that would cross all age groups and social layers was needed. It soon transpired that normal methods would not work and so they turned to the alternative Guerrilla Marketing industry. Eventually a scheme emerged that involved spray-painting roadways, parking lots and cross roads onto existing parking lots, school areas, streets and supermarkets in the target neighbourhoods. People would see these and bring along their Micro Machines and play them on the sprayed miniature surfaces. By all accounts a great hit, and increased the sales for the manufacturer at a fraction of the cost of regular marketing campaigns. This is a good use of Guerrilla marketing, particularly as the paint used was bio- degradable and would disappear over time. All the businesses in the vicinity benefited because the people attracted to the painted play areas would buy something in one or more of the shops. Totally acceptable form of alternative marketing and an example of how it should be done.

In Milan there is a newspaper called the Gazzetta dello Sport. Faced with needing to increase circulation throughout Milan they set about considering marketing plans and campaigns. It soon became clear that they would need to think beyond normal campaigns and so came into contact with Guerrilla Marketing. The newspaper itself was printed on pink paper – maybe this could be incorporated into some form of marketing ploy. Some bright spark thought of turning Milan pink. Not literally but via pink confetti or paper dropped from the sky and carpeting Milan. The Milanese first did not understand what was happening and did not link the pink confetti with the newspaper. This is the unacceptable face of Guerrilla Marketing because of the after effects. The whole place had to be cleaned up at some cost. The circulation did not increase significantly. The target audience was mainly male because of the sporting connection, and all the males with a sporting interest already bought the paper anyway. In short, the marketing ploy failed and at the same time polluted the centre of Milan for a few days. Certainly there are better ways to win friends and influence people. So OK, that is my view, what do you guys out there think? Did it succeed in a raw marketing way? Was the pollution and clean up effort worth the marketing advantage? I think not.

Arguably the most famous, or should that be infamous, guerrilla marketing campaign to date was that of a Time Warner subsidiary, Turner Broadcasting inc. Moving away from traditional marketing strategies they “thought out of the box” when it came to advertising their new cartoon show “Aqua Teen Hunger Force”. They placed 40 small, black, electronically operated light boxes, around different cities including Boston, Mass. The marketing campaign backfired in Boston because people linked these boxes to bombs and caused wide spread panic. The whole point of what is called guerrilla marketing is to get the product or service into the forefront of the public. There is no doubt that this marketing campaign did exactly that. So was the campaign successful? If you measure success by the effect the campaign has on the general public then yes, it was a success. However, officialdom took a totally different view. The mayor called the event a “stunt” perpetrated solely in the interest of profit. He has a point and looked at from his point of view criticism is justified. But what about John Q. Citizen? The people the campaign was directed to? Most thought on reflection that the marketing campaign was good. I think I will side with them on this one.

A company in Baden-Wurttemberg had brought on line a new geothermal power station, delivering electricity cleanly and quietly to the area. EnBw wanted to make everyone in the region aware of this power station. They decided to move beyond normal marketing thinking and enlisted the help of the newly emerging guerrilla marketing industry. They came up with a good idea, one that would be right in the face of the public. They made large white stickers for the ground and stuck onto it two round metal posts to make the whole thing look like a huge German power plug. On the sticker they wrote the slogan “Energy that doesn’t disappear. Geothermal Heat2. Aside from the couple of people with bad eyesight falling over them, the campaign certainly did what it set out to do. To me this is an acceptable use of the so-called guerrilla marketing industry. For the money spent it is arguable if any other advertising method could have achieved the same effect. The campaign itself was non- polluting and therefore contributing to a “green” environment. However, it could not be said to be non-invasive as the area of the “plug” was around a square metre.