This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Guerrilla Marketing" by Jay Conrad Levinson. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What are the different types of guerrilla marketing? Which methods do modern marketers use? Which types are best if your business has limited resources?
Marketing guru Jay Conrad Levinson wrote his book, Guerrilla Marketing, to teach business owners how to use inexpensive marketing techniques that build brand awareness. According to Levinson, using these techniques is better than relying on mass media marketing, especially if you lack resources.
Read on to learn the five types of guerrilla marketing methods to try if you’re working with limited resources.
What Is Guerrilla Marketing?
According to Jay Conrad Levinson, guerrilla marketers don’t let limited resources prevent them from making a big impact with their marketing. Unlike traditional marketers, they don’t assume that the only way to build brand awareness and generate sales is to rely on expensive mass-market approaches. We’ll explore five types of guerrilla marketing to show you how to find customers that already want what you’re offering and ideas for creating positive customer interactions.
Guerrilla marketers focus their marketing efforts on reaching customers that already want what they have to offer. They then plan inexpensive ways to appeal to and create positive interactions with these specific customers—for example, by offering free samples and discounts to build customer confidence, getting involved in community and charitable events to improve customer perception, or providing an excellent after-sales service to promote customer loyalty.
Below is an overview of five modern types of guerrilla marketing that can help to grow your business, even if you have limited resources.
The 5 Types of Guerrilla Marketing
The definition of guerrilla marketing has evolved quite dramatically since Levinson originally coined the term in 1984. While present-day guerrilla marketers continue to follow the advice to create positive customer interactions, the techniques they use to achieve this bear little resemblance to those Levinson details in the book. Rather, modern guerrilla marketers come up with increasingly unique and imaginative ways to grab attention and delight audiences.
We’ll therefore provide an overview of these types of guerrilla marketing techniques to help you come up with your own ideas:
Street marketing: An outdoor method that brings street elements into play. For example, McDonald’s created the MacFries pedestrian crossing to lure customers during Zurichfest.
Ambient marketing: A type of guerrilla marketing that promotes products and services in unusual places to disrupt customer perception. For example, BIC placed a giant razor at the foot of a strip of mowed lawn to demonstrate how sharp their razors are.
Ambush marketing: A guerrilla marketing method that attempts to take advantage of free publicity by imposing on events sponsored by other businesses. For example, Stella Artois placed ads around transport links for the 2011 US Open to imply that it was the official sponsor. It wasn’t—Heineken was, but event-goers didn’t realize that.
Experiential marketing: A type of guerrilla marketing that creates immersive experiences to help people relate to a brand. For example, Tyskie Beer placed decals around door handles in restaurants, pubs, and shops to make people feel like they were holding a beer mug each time they opened a door.
Stealth marketing: A guerrilla marketing method that attempts to influence people without them realizing that they’re being targeted. The most popular type involves product placement in movies—for example, in Castaway, the protagonist survives a plane crash only to be left stranded on a desert island surrounded by FedEx parcels.
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Here's what you'll find in our full Guerrilla Marketing summary:
- Why you don't need expensive mass-media marketing campaigns
- How to create a profitable marketing message and strategy
- How to define your target market and keep costs low
