Father Bob Maguire Foundation

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.