Guerrilla Marketing Principles

Marketing is a wide range of activities related to making sure that it continues to meet your needs and get the proper value in return.  It focuses on customer orientation and satisfaction of customer needs.  In the description, marketing is the activity set of institutions and procedures for creating, communicating, communication and exchange of offers that are of value for customers, clients, partners and society. The objectives of the organization depend on the knowledge of the needs and requirements of the target markets and delivering the desired satisfaction.  This suggests that in order to meet their organizational goals, organizations should anticipate the needs and desires of consumers and satisfy the most effective competitors.  Marketing strategies vary depending on the product, target market and budget.

The concept of guerrilla marketing was set up as an unconventional system of promotions based on time, energy and imagination instead of big marketing budgets.  Typically, guerrilla marketing campaigns are unexpected and un-conventional, possibly interactive, targeted consumers in unexpected places.  The aim of guerrilla marketing is to create a unique, exciting and challenging collaboration Guerrilla Marketing is specifically geared for small businesses and entrepreneurs.  There is speculation in guerrilla marketing.  Should be based on human psychology, not experience, judgments and assumptions.  Instead of money, basic marketing investments should be time, energy and imagination.  Basic statistics on where your business is profit, not sales.   On the basis of understanding the science of psychology, Guerrilla marketing focuses more on building relationships with customers and provides confidence to sell the product or service.  Also, sometimes involves handing out samples of products, so the potential buyer to “try” before you buys.  Also, merchants’ typically smaller rebel groups target consumers, while the traditional marketing is targeting a wider market. Guerrilla marketing does not rely solely on one marketing weapon, combining different types of marketing tactics.

There are some differences between the importance of traditional marketing and guerrilla marketing.  Guerrilla marketing to live in the moment.  Instead of investing huge sums of money by investing their time, energy, imagination and information.  They remove the smokescreen of the complex economic and simplification.   Traditional marketing is aimed at large companies with big budgets. Guerrilla marketing has a lot of ways to make money without money.  Traditional marketing measures the success of sales, stocks and turnover.  Guerrilla marketing measure success solely profit.  Traditional retailers learn about their buying experience, thinking and speculation.

Guerrilla Marketing Principles

Marketing and advertising has changed over time.  More and more companies, large and small, are beginning to implement new and more creative marketing tactics such as guerrilla marketing, and will not be ready soon.  Is the cause or the result of new advertising strategies, consumer perception of advertising is also changing.  For a company to be or remain successful, it must be open to new tactics and strategies, such as guerrilla marketing, and be one step ahead of their marketing activities competition. Six principles of guerrilla marketing are;

1. Completely Unexpected

The result of completely unexpected situation is a surprise- a moment when the situation that arises was not expected and the participant of the event was not prepared to witness or be part of such situation. There are many ways how to catch interest of people by putting usual objects to unusual places or using usual objects in unusual time. Unexpectedness may be used as an advantage. By witnessing a surprising situation people tend to raise their attention. Therefore, the marketers may use such situation to attract the visitor, on Internet in particular, to receive a message which contains the marketing message.

Guerrilla marketing trades effort for money, very important fact is that unexpected campaign can be taken negative by the target audience eventually. The marketer should build the campaign in such way that will minimize the negative effects of the element of surprise in the campaign as a part of the Attention phase, the first phase of AIDA model. A process of segmentation and proper profiling of target audience can be identified as one of the most important part of preparation for building a guerrilla campaign which use the moment of unexpectedness effectively.

2. Drastic

A word “drastic” is defined by Oxford Dictionary as having a strong or far-reaching effect. Any guerrilla marketing campaign should work with a form of rusticity in order to reach maximum relevant target audience. The element rusticity enables the marketer to reach large number of message receivers without necessarily large marketing budget. It is the element that may significantly help the campaign to be cost-effective with high degree of Attention and Interest element. The negative aspect of any form of drastic behavior is that the marketing message can be automatically rejected of the target audience, or its part, because it can assess the campaign as impolite or strongly negatively affecting their individual values.

3. Humorous

Humorous effect in the marketing communication helps to diminish the barriers between the sender and receiver, the business organization and the customer respectively. Moreover, entertainment in the marketing communication can significantly increase the efficiency of the campaign by reaching larger number of receivers. Humorous effect is in promotion and marketing communication difficult to create however by looking at the video coverage of chosen guerrilla campaigns in the end of this section as a part of this work shows that the effect is in guerrilla campaigns is commonly used. The humorous aspect is also one of those that differentiate the campaign from most of others. However,   many so called guerrilla marketing campaigns have not proved that humor was one of the elements of the campaign and those guerrilla marketing campaigns that contains the effect of humor reach more receivers and helps to create interest. Humor is used commonly in viral marketing campaigns distributed over Internet uncoordinated by the users.

4. One Shot Game

One shot game, meaning that the guerrilla marketing campaign is performed only in strictly limited period of time, indicates that the receivers of the guerrilla messages understand that the campaign is only temporary the concept should not be used again on the same market. This aspect has in Internet marketing great importance because variety of interactive tools and techniques can make long-term guerrilla campaign for users that will be allowed to see the campaign only temporarily. The campaign can last several months but once the visitors watch it, it never appears on his/her screen again.

5. Cheap

The cost of guerrilla campaign can be often the purpose of attractiveness for the businesses. The objective is to create rumor, buzz effect and immediate impact on target group but still keeping the budget tight. This means: creativity, innovation and saving processes come necessarily to place in the marketing planning. The principles of innovation and creativity  reveals its importance because cost-effectiveness and creativity may be the major factor influencing the marketing managers or SME business owners to apply guerrilla marketing principles on Internet, as the primary research findings indicated. The cost is relative parameter when it comes to comparison of cost to target group impact. The large number of internet users and technical accessibility of the Internet content indicate that the impact of any guerrilla marketing campaign can be large and therefore the cost of the guerrilla campaign highly depend on the planned targeted segments to be reached and type of the guerrilla marketing campaign. However, there should be still clearly identifiable difference between the necessary budget for guerrilla campaign and a traditional marketing campaign (for example Internet banner ad) with the same target group.

6. Goodwill and Customer Benefit

Goodwill can be defined as a disposition to kindness and compassion or more specifically as an intangible asset which provides a competitive advantage, such as a strong brand, reputation, or high employee morale. Customer benefit can be the most difficult aspect to reach in applying to the marketing activity. When a customer buys a laptop in a store, he pays for his own benefit to work and communicate anywhere. He gets benefit immediately because he purchased the laptop and opened it up in his car and started immediately to use it. However, the customer benefit may be less visible when another customer is travelling to her office by tram and she is exposed to several numbers of billboards, big boards, light boards or flyers during the way. The benefit for her can come at the time she uses the business message from an advert for her own benefit by purchasing new laptop for 25% discount for example than in the store where she was planning to buy it. However, for those people who do not need any of the products and services aggressively communicated in most of the advertising places outside the benefit is very difficult or even impossible to find.

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