Guerrilla Marketing

The first time I heard about this term when I was reading a case study about Barak Obama marketing campaign. Everybody recognizes the massive success of this campaign in 2008, which returns partly to the guerrilla marketing strategies or sometimes referred as grass root marketing.

To define guerrilla marketing is basically an advertising tactics that use un-conventional methods to create social buzz. In another words guerrilla marketing revolves around taking the prospects by surprise and creating a lasting impression on them which usually produce maximum results. Small, medium organizations use guerrilla marketing. However large organizations also use this type of marketing along with traditional marketing strategies such TV, radio and print to reach to more audience. more about guerrilla marketing here.

This pictures is taken from http://blog.mobileweb.be/tag/presidents/

This pictures is taken from http://blog.mobileweb.be/tag/presidents/

In Obama election, the campaign made a phenomenal use of new media and guerrilla marketing. The campaign utilized all social media such as flicker, twitter and facebook to provide the user most recent updates. Citizens received campaign ads directly on their mobile phones. And then they received personalized thank you SMS message From Barak Obama. That effort in mobile marketing and guerrilla marketing strategies was a success in Obama campaign and produced in excellent results comparing with other parties who didn’t use guerrilla marketing. More about Obama case study here. And more examples of successful guerrilla marketing campaign can be found here.

Guerrilla marketing mainly uses imagination to create the social buzz and grab prospect attention, however, sometimes this type of marketing doesn’t go right and provide negative attention. So, whenever you are considering using Guerrilla marketing for your company consider the worst case scenario that can happen. If it would generate more negative response than positive then it would be a good idea to alter techniques. Example on campaign that wasn’t successful is the video of Shark in Lake Ontario that cause frightening in the general public. which after six days Discovery Canada admitted the finned creature was a life-like model. (more details about this campaign here ).

What do you think of guerrilla marketing? share your thoughts in comment section, personally I think guerrilla marketing is very good advertising technique but consider using it with caution 🙂

Enjoy your weekend.

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