Guerilla Marketing and Small Business, Part 1

Unless you’ve been a recluse for the past couple of months, you couldn’t help but hear about the recent marketing attempt in Boston by Turner Broadcasting for the “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” animated movie. You know the one, where little blinky signs were mistaken for bombs by Boston city officials, causing traffic chaos, media attention and legal action?

This type of publicity stunt is an extreme example of what is known as guerrilla marketing. The term was coined by a marketing guru by the name of Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1984 book, Guerrilla Marketing. In this series we will take a look at what guerrilla marketing is, and why or why not it might be something worth doing for your business.

First of all, what exactly is guerilla marketing? As described in Levinson’s book, it is an unconventional way of performing promotional activities on a very low budget. Such promotions are sometimes designed so that the target audience is left unaware they have been marketed to and may therefore be a form of undercover marketing (also called stealth marketing).

While the Boston incident was on one end of the spectrum, common examples that you see everyday include pop-up blockers and site sponsorships on the internet. There are all different levels of guerilla marketing being used daily, and over the next few installments of this series, we’ll take a look at some techniques that might appeal to you when it comes to promoting your small business.