It presents a view that how Guerilla Marketing have been used by SMEs to outsmart business giants. It also tells ways to design an effective Guerilla Marketing Strategy.
The Blair Witch pre-release campaign which ,was a very impressive guerrilla strategy used by college students who were movie makers who made this super low budget horror flick and made it a national blockbuster attracting lot of attention using the actual urban legend. Thanks to a website that thousands of gullible early adopters bought into along with some posters that expertly blurred the line between fantasy and reality
1999′s The Blair Witch Project. With no stars, no script, and a budget of around $50,000, University of Central Florida Film School pals Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez successfully scrubbed out the line between reality and fiction.
The film’s tagline set the stage: “In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. A year later, their footage was found.” Audiences were expected to believe what they were watching — shaky, low-quality videotape of three runny-nosed kids weeping in the woods — was an edited-down version of real recovered footage. And while it was certainly an inventive way to challenge the boundaries of cinematic storytelling (not to mention justifying the low-budget look of the film), Blair Witchdidn’t exactly seem poised to rival Titanic. That is, until an inventive guerrilla marketing scheme was devised.
To ease the suspension of disbelief and stir up some buzz, Sánchez created a Web site devoted to the Blair Witch — a fictitious, woods-based specter who’d been snapping up Maryland kids for the last century. Although the legend was created out of whole cloth, it was soon snapped up by gullible Interneters everywhere, and a first-ballot hall of fame urban legend was born. Pretty soon, thousands of people were terrified of the Blair Witch. Even when the actors who played the “film students” started showing up (alive) doing interviews about the movie, many across the country refused to believe the Blair Witch wasn’t real.
From that point, the “I’ve got to see for myself” effect took over, and Blair Witch dominated at the box office. Considered the most effective horror hoax since Orson Welles’ The War Of The Worlds broadcast, the film grossed $250 million worldwide. Not a bad return for Artisan Entertainment, which paid only $1 million for the flick after its Sundance screening
One such example worth mentioning is of Snapdeal.com, arch rival of Groupone, who thanks to their daring stunt in 2011 attracted maximum attention online as well as offline. It renamed an entire village in India from Nagar to Snapdeal.com Nagar. Though initially people were not very impressed with this stunt, later further digging revealed that Snapdeal.com actually done a lot for the community, including providing clean drinking water facilities and promising to upgrade the local school and hospital. The story hit outlets from CNN to Mashable and SnapDeal promised to provide clean drinking water for 15 years. This guerrilla marketing attempt along with the CSR component garnered a lot of favourable attention towards Snapdeal.com
FOOTBALL PLAYERS were not the only ones fighting for supremacy at the recently ended World Cup pitch: Shoe brands were fighting for glory too. For the most part, it was the fluorescent Nike Vapors versus the Adidas Adizera Battle Pack clears. But while those brands dominate the soccer market, one smaller competitor had a counterattack. This was in the form of mismatched pink and blue soccer boots called Tricks by Puma.
Puma cleverly sneaked into the game without incurring heavy advertising expenditure. The giants, Nike and Adidas, were officially advertising as they were FIFA World Cup partners. This came at a cost of $75 million for each of the six official partners, according to Advertising Age. Well, they can afford the bill, as between them they have a 70 percent share of the soccer market. Nike makes about $25 billion in annual revenue, Adidas $19 billion, while Puma makes only $4 billion.
What can underdog entrepreneurs learn from these tricks of the trade? A lot.
Target a narrow market segment. Your brand can’t be all things to all people. Guerilla marketing is the strategy that works for small and medium sized businesses that do not have big marketing budgets. In our current environment that is true for most businesses. The reason the strategy works is because one uses creativity, rather than money, to create a buzz and draw attention to one’s products.
For guerilla marketing to be effective, the small business will have to reduce the field of play. Instead of targeting the mass market served by big companies, the guerilla marketer targets a small niche. In other words, it tries to become a big fish in a small pond. You can become a guerilla marketer by targeting a small area. This could be a certain suburb of a city or certain types of customers across the country.
You don’t need the spotlight of TV commercials or megabrand tie-ins. In bypassing World Cup commercials Puma is preferring to let the product’s performance do the talking. The product experience is where you build a performance brand. You can’t get there with advertising. Advertising is a turbocharger, but the product is where you really create authenticity and credibility.
3. A differentiated image can help you. Puma’s latest cleats are visibly different from Nike’s and Adidas’s. While Nike and Adidas focused on fins, ultra-light synthetic materials, and intricate knitting that fused the boot with the sock, Puma kept its strategy simple: “really bright shoes in different colors,” writes Stock. You read that right: Each shoe is a different color. The right boot is pink. The left boot is blue.
As for Puma, its pink-and-blue shoes are an illustrative reminder of how image can become a significant point of differentiation for an underdog brand. Perhaps most importantly, the differentiated look allows Puma’s endorsers to cast themselves as difference-makers, too. For example, Mario Balotelli, a standout player on Italy’s team, said: “In the end, it is exactly the reason why I chose to be with Puma. They dare to be different, and everyone knows that I do as well.
Here are the main principles of guerilla marketing that you can start using today and accelerate your growth without a big advertising budget:
a) Presence: you have to find ways to make yourself known by your target market at all times. These may include email; forums; discussion boards; radio; magazines; websites; social media; blogs; yellow pages.
b) Activity: you should always be on the lookout for opportunities to make your products known at all times and work on them.
c) Energy: you must be marketing all the time, “360 degree” marketing! Your creativity and hard work is what will produce positive results.
d) Networks: you must always be looking to make contacts and develop networks. Relationships are very important in guerilla marketing.
e) Smart: your marketing activities must be smart; do not offend customers or turn them off; e.g. by sending spam emails or irritating text messages, or being overly pushy.