The History of Guerilla Marketing
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.
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.
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.