The loose billboards and the giant eggs of House of the Dragon are a prime example: Guerrilla Marketing works and has a huge impact, especially if you evaluate the engagement with a brand or the promotion of an event.
The birth of Guerrilla Marketing dates back to 1984 and is the daughter of the advertising boom of those years: the term, coined by Jay Conrad Levinson, defines an unconventional form of marketing that uses low-cost tools to maximize results. Guerrilla Marketing, in fact, was created for small companies that did not have the possibility to allocate substantial budgets for advertising promotion.
But how does it work and why use it?
The Benefits of Guerrilla Marketing
-
Low Budget: precisely because it is designed for businesses with little spending power, guerrilla marketing can also be extremely low budget, because it exploits idealized campaigns more by exploiting the power of the idea than the budget. An example of this is the McDonald's advertisement that used potato chips to replace the zebra crossing of a Zurich intersection. Extremely low costs, but an incalculable return in terms of brand identity.
-
Visibility: the surprise effect on which guerrilla marketing is based can allow a company to become memorable in the mind of those who see it. This, added to the strong originality that distinguishes the activities of this type of marketing, guarantees a great media attention which, by itself, can bring back the invested budget, whether it is small or not.
Stand out from competitors: emerging in highly competitive sectors is very difficult. Distinguishing yourself with a high-impact one-shot activity is often much easier than achieving the same goal with an annual marketing plan divided into multiple activities. -
Exploit originality: unlike the vast majority of "standard" marketing campaigns, what Guerrilla Marketing pushes is not so much the product, but the ideas behind it, which become the real engine of the business.
- Power of sharing: social and digital technology have given Guerrilla Marketing a huge booster. Sharing, in fact, exercises enormous power, capable of making even the lesser known brand go viral.
Three examples of Guerrilla Marketing
Among all the Guerrilla Marketing campaigns, some have certainly remained in the collective memory:
Who expected to find a bench transformed into the most famous Nestlè bar? This is what KitKat's marketing has chosen to represent, taking up its famous motto "Have a Break, Have a KitKat".
And what about Coca Cola? In 2010, the American giant focused on a Guerrilla Marketing campaign that involved the CocaCola Happiness Machine, a crazy distributor that distributed that offered customers an enormous number of bottles of the drink of the same name, bouquets of flowers, pizzas, etc.
Last but not least in our top three is Netflix, which to promote the release of Stranger Things 3 has chosen to populate cities with paranormal manifestations of the Upside Down such as portals between dimensions at bus stops, telephone booths covered with ectoplasm and means of transport overturned.
Do you want to know which marketing activities are best suited to promote your business? Contact us!
