Surprise your audience with creative experiences and strategies that only a professional Guerrilla Marketing campaign can guarantee.
In a general analysis, marketing is a comprehensive science with distinct strategies and approaches. Among these countless practices, there are those that rely on technical lines and more exact formulas, and others that use creativity to ensure their repercussion and persuasion, following more daring and unconventional paths for selling products or services. If you have read, or witnessed, something more about Guerrilla Marketing, you already know that it fits in the second option.
This type of action is designed to have an impact. For this reason, it is usually carried out in public spaces. Guerrilla Marketing is recommended for those who want a quick result in a short period of time, and it needs to be very well planned in order not to cause the opposite effect: to be invasive or disturbing. Learn a little more about this strategy and some examples to understand it in practice.
What is Guerrilla Marketing?
Among all the Marketing modalities, Guerrilla Marketing is one of the most creative and, when well elaborated, also one of the most effective. This is because it is in its nature to be easily perceived, attacking the monotony of daily life and appealing to ideas that transcend the normality of the environment, or part of it.
This type of strategy aims to be unforgettable (in a good way) for its potential audience. By turning brands into subjects, it can encompass different reactions, such as happy, serious, provocative, and even funny.
If we are to enumerate, there are three major advantages that place Guerrilla Marketing as a successful practice: the surprise effect, the organic viralization, and, very importantly, the possibility of making the campaign viable with low investments. Tempting, no? We will show some good examples later in this same text.
What is the origin of the name Guerrilla Marketing?
Today, one of the main thermometers of the success of a Guerrilla Marketing campaign is its massive repercussion in social networks. However, the origin of this marketing strategy is from the late 1970s, when the internet was still a future dream. What many people do not know is that this contradiction has a literary origin, because the concept of Guerrilla Marketing was created by a U.S. writer named Lay Conrad Levinson, who published the book “Guerrilla Marketing” in 1984.
The relationship between the book and the communication tactic is based on an analysis of the Vietnam War, more precisely the tactics used by the North Vietnamese. The latter, who, unlike the South Vietnamese, did not have the support of the USA, had to develop several creative guerrilla techniques to fight and delay Uncle Sam’s troops, who were advancing with the best war technology money could buy. The insight came from the situation where creativity beat high monetary investment.
What is essential to design a Guerrilla Marketing campaign?
Just like any other marketing-related piece, there are infinite ways to attract the attention of certain audiences and stimulate them to the famous reasoning of desire followed by purchase.
At this point, having the macro knowledge is everything. So, before you really start producing your content, it is of utmost importance to develop a deep study to have catalogued who your potential customers really are and what they are looking for.
I have gathered this information. Now what? Well, now we are half way there. From this point on, other important procedures come into play, such as conducting a deep study of which Guerrilla Marketing actions have already been done aiming to reach audiences similar to yours, thinking of creative ways to stand out in a unique way, making a good selection of locations for the action, and checking the possibility of establishing partnerships with brands that would add positively to your company’s concept. You cannot forget to establish KPIs and ways to measure the results of the action.
As you may have already realized, this is a job for professionals. Thus, hiring a communication agency with experience in the matter, such as Vision Comunicação, can make all the difference between spending little and getting great results, or spending a lot with little effectiveness.
To make it even clearer how this practice works, we have compiled for you some cases that are great examples of good Guerrilla Marketing practices. Check them out:
Shark Week
In the United States, the “Shark Week”, or the “Shark Week”, promoted by the Discovery Channel, is already a classic program and for decades has always been highly anticipated by its audience during the summer.
This year, 2019, in order to promote Shark Week, the famous TV channel headed up a literally gigantic Guerrilla Marketing campaign by installing 5 inflatable parts of a great white shark in its own building located in the Silver Spring area.
The idea was to make sure the show would not go unnoticed, and at the same time to promote the station itself. Going a little further, the operational cost in these cases is much lower than in a conventional campaign. After all, besides all the visualization of the giant shark by residents and visitors, there is still a massive viralization of the photos of the building with the shark in social networks and related content portals.
Discover Pernambuco
With the objective of divulging the attractions of Pernambuco to the citizens of São Paulo, the Secretary of Tourism, Sports, and Leisure of the State carried out an action at the Paulista station and in some trains of the yellow line of the city’s subway. Without a doubt, one of the busiest lines.
The idea here was to immerse the user in Pernambuco’s attractions. For this, one of the station exits and the train cars were adhered with landscapes of Porto de Galinhas, Praia dos Carneiros, Olinda, Recife Carnival, and São João, referring to the fauna, flora, sightseeing, and culture of Pernambuco as a whole.
In addition, promoters in costumes of bathers, revelers, among others, interacted with the subway users, took pictures, and distributed gifts. Who wouldn’t feel like buying the next ticket to Pernambuco after this action?
Check out some of the images in this link.
Save the Arctic
With the strong message “Don’t let your future melt”, the activist group Greenpeace was present on the most famous street in São Paulo, Avenida Paulista, with a very well structured Guerrilla Marketing campaign.
The objective of the action was to call people’s attention to the unleashed oil exploration in the North Pole region. To this end, an allegory of a polar bear was placed inside blocks of ice that would inevitably end up melting before the eyes of everyone passing by the avenue.
As a good Guerrilla Marketing, the action fulfilled its role generating reflection on the theme and making those who care about all animal life residing in this part of the planet aware.
The strategy, in a way, is similar to the previous one (of the subway), because it works on the concept of public immersion. In this case, the idea is to “transport” the person to the North Pole, since a large part of this public will never be able to actually see the melting Arctic ice and understand the situation up close.
Click on this link to see a record of the action.
Tabu Latin America
Using São Paulo as the stage for the show, this Guerrilla Marketing case was elaborated and executed by NatGeo to promote their program Tabu, where they present people with “unconventional” customs that are still seen with prejudice by a large part of society.
The action did not measure efforts to get the public’s attention. Using a crane, they performed a body suspension at 50 meters high in the middle of Paulista Avenue.
The star of the whole action was the blogger Rafael Mendes, aka Rafa Gnomo, 23, who was lifted another 10 meters every 50 hashtags #Tabu published by internet users. The action was a success, having lifted the blogger to the maximum height planned.
See here images of this action that was a great success on the streets and on the networks.
Tennis Box Store
In the world of Guerrilla Marketing, impressing at first sight is a very important factor to legitimize the quality of the action. And Adidas knows this very well.
In a campaign to publicize the 50 years of the Stan Smith line of tennis shoes, in honor of an American tennis player who won the 1st Tennis Masters Cup in 1970, a special store was built for fans. The space contained several technologies involved, such as the possibility of putting your own face and signature on the models available for purchase. But what really caught the attention of the whole world was another factor.
The temporary store was built in the shape of a large tennis shoe box – in this case, the same box as the Stan Smith model, but in larger proportions. The whole action took place in London and was a major milestone for Adidas’ best-selling model in all its history, surpassing 40 million pairs.
Take a look at the photos of the store by clicking here.
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