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What is Guerrilla Marketing?

How can I apply this principle to my business?

How can I know more about this?

"Guerrilla Marketing," was coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his popular 1984 book Guerrilla Marketing, as an unconventional system of promotions on a very low budget, by relying on time, energy and imagination instead of big marketing budgets. The term has since entered the popular vocabulary to also describe aggressive, unconventional marketing methods generically.

Levinson's books include hundreds of "Guerrilla Marketing weapons," but they also encourage the guerrilla marketer to be creative and devise his own unconventional methods of promotion. The marketer uses all of his or her contacts, both professional and personal, and must examine his company and its products, looking for sources of publicity. Many forms of publicity can be very inexpensive, others are free.

Levinson says that when implementing guerrilla marketing tactics, small size is actually an advantage instead of a disadvantage. Small businesses and entrepreneurs are able to obtain publicity more easily than large companies; they are closer to their customers and considerably more agile.

Yet ultimately, according to Levinson, the Guerrilla Marketer must "deliver the goods". In The Guerrilla Marketing Handbook, he states: "In order to sell a product or a service, a company must establish a relationship with the customer. It must build trust and support. It must understand the customer's needs, and it must provide a product that delivers the promised benefits."

Levinson identifies the following principles as the foundation of guerrilla marketing:

1. Guerrilla Marketing is specifically geared for the small business and entrepreneur.
2. It should be based on human psychology instead of experience, judgment, and guesswork.
3. Instead of money, the primary investments of marketing should be time, energy, and imagination.
4. The primary statistic to measure your business is the amount of profits, not sales.
5. The marketer should also concentrate on how many new relationships are made each month.
6. Create a standard of excellence with an acute focus instead of trying to diversify by offering too many diverse products and services.
7. Instead of concentrating on getting new customers, aim for more referrals, more transactions with existing customers, and larger transactions.
8. Forget about the competition and concentrate more on cooperating with other businesses.
9. Guerrilla Marketers should always use a combination of marketing methods for a campaign.
10.Use current technology as a tool to empower your marketing.

Associated marketing trends
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Guerrilla Marketing is the bestselling marketing brand in history, and includes dozens of books, an association, and a web site. The term is now often used more loosely as a descriptor for non-traditional media, such as:

a. Viral marketing -- through social networks
b. Ambient marketing
c. Presence marketing
d. Grassroots marketing
e. Alternative marketing
f. Buzz marketing -- word of mouth marketing
g. Undercover marketing -- subtle product placement
h. Astroturfing -- releasing company news to imitate grassroots popularity
i. Experiential marketing -- interaction with product
j. Guerrilla marketing was initially used by small and medium size (SMEs) businesses, but it is now increasingly adopted by large businesses.

Guerrilla marketing warfare strategies
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In marketing and strategic management, marketing warfare strategies are a type of marketing strategy that uses military metaphor to craft a businesses strategy. See marketing warfare strategies for background and an overview. Guerrilla marketing warfare strategies are a type of marketing warfare strategy designed to wear-down the enemy by a long series of minor attacks. Rather than engage in major battles, a guerrilla force is divided into small groups that selectively attacks the target at its weak points. To be effective, guerrilla teams must be able to hide between strikes. They can disappear into the remote countryside, or blend into the general population. The general form of the strategy is a sequence of attacking, retreating, and hiding, repeated multiple times in series. It has been said that “Guerrilla forces never win wars, but their adversaries often lose them”.

Strengths
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The main strengths of guerrilla strategies are:

1. Never attacking the enemy’s main force preserves resources.
2. It is very flexible and can be adapted to any situation, offensive or defensive.
3. It is very difficult to counter with conventional methods.

Guerrilla marketing warfare involves
In the business arena, this involves:

1. Targeted legal attacks on the competition.
2. Product comparison advertising.
3. Executive raiding.
4. Short-term alliances.
5. Selective price cuts.
6. Deliberate sabotage of the competitions test markets, marketing research, advertising campaigns, or sales promotions.
7. Orchestrating negative publicity for a competitor.
8. A Guerrilla marketer must be flexible. They must be able to change tactics very quickly; this may include abandoning a market segment, product, product line, brand, business model, or objective. Guerrillas are not ashamed to make a strategic withdrawal.

The strategy is suitable when:
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a. the target competitor has relatively strong resources and is well able to withstand a head-on attack.
b. the attacker has moderately weak resources.

It can involve choosing a modest market segment, geographical territory, or niche and defending it, that is, it is incorrectly used to describe a niche strategy. The term Guerrilla marketing is sometimes used to refer simply to the use of unorthodox marketing tactics.

thanks guys, it will help a lot. kuyaw!