Guerilla Marketing

Guerilla marketing has to be a fan favorite in the ad world, and for consumers. It’s a great way for brands to create unique and interactive advertisements with their consumers without having that intrusive and inconveniencing feel that more conventional media advertisements come with. Guerilla marketing is geared towards smaller businesses, but can (and has) started to be used by larger brands such as Volkswagen and Coca-Cola. Of course no marketing strategy is perfect, so there are downsides to using guerilla marketing. It requires more energy and dedication in order to pull off and also requires a company willing to take a risk on something. The whole point of guerilla marketing is to be experimental and unique and do something specifically that other companies haven’t done before. So in that sense a company needs to be committed to going into the unknown in order for guerilla marketing to really work. And it’s not always a guarantee that it will work. Advertising isn’t an exact science so there will always be risk in doing something different. With all that said guerilla marketing has seen an uprising in usage over the last few decades, which most mean it’s working for the most part.

I unfortunately have never gotten to experience any true guerilla marketing, but I guess that comes with living in Ottawa. I could see it happening down in the market some time, and with a quick google search nothing leaps off the page as having ever happened. So I think there’s a lot of potential there since no one has ever done it, if you were the first to do it, and it was good it’d probably get picked up by the local news.

The very first guerrilla marketing campaign that I ever saw was by Mini when they were just coming in to the North American markets. The agency was Crispin Porter & Bogusky. There were so many different aspects and approaches with this campaign and it really was a true “small company using a small budget with a small agency” type approach. They created large versions of everyday things and placed them in air ports. Created coin operated toy Mini’s and placed them in malls, and put a mini on top of a large SUV and toured it around the city for the day. They embraced the cars smallness and it worked. Mini Cooper saw a huge growth in sales in the next year or two and the agency behind it became one of the hottest agencies in the country (pictures of the campaign down below).

I think that no matter what happens with online and mobile advertising Guerilla Marketing will always be here, because consumers will never stop liking this unique and fun approach to advertising towards them. I think that guerilla marketing might try and incorporate social media into it and possibly mobile advertising, but the more you start to integrate other things into GM you start to lose the ambiance of it and it starts to become intrusive like old medias. So future GM’s will have to test the water and take some risk if they want to figure out what works and what doesn’t, but that’s guerilla marketing for you.