Guerrilla Marketing: Defined In Today's Terms

The term "guerrilla marketing" has now been around for 25 years, if you can believe it, and it was coined and popularized by marketing guru Jay Conrad Levinson through his book, Guerrilla Marketing: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business. The international best-seller has spawned 27 other related, guerrilla-themed business books, and Levinson's guerrilla concepts have influenced marketing so much that today his works appear in 41 languages and are required reading in many MBA programs worldwide. You can check out Levinson's official site here.

I recently became reacquainted with this seminal tome, now in its fourth edition, and that leads me to this post today. Nothing whatsoever against Levinson or the concept, but guerrilla marketing is somewhat of an outdated term nowadays that has given way to more current terminology, such as buzz marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, grassroots marketing, viral marketing, crowdsourcing, and social media/new media marketing. Honestly, one just doesn't hear it mentioned much any more when discussing marketing options. Regardless of what it's called, all of the functions I just named can be grouped under the guerrilla marketing umbrella, and this approach remains a viable (and dare I say it? necessary!) component for most small business marketing programs today. As has been proven by Levinson, and countless companies who have implemented programs of this nature over the years, guerrilla marketing...in whatever form, or by any other name...can be extraordinarily useful to firms with limited resources.

So how is guerrilla marketing defined today? I really like the definition offered by my colleagues over at UnderstandingMarketing.com:

"Guerrilla marketing is a very low budget way of promoting a company, series of products or services, or specific marketing campaign. Rather than use traditional forms of expensive advertising and promotions, guerrilla marketing instead leverages imagination, time and energy while utilizing word-of-mouth resources to get in front of people with a specific message. Guerrilla marketers rely on creativity and ingenuity to leverage unconventional forms of marketing to get people excited about a specific marketing campaign. Some guerrilla marketing tactics are more reliant on energy, like handing out flyers at a large public venue. While other forms rely more on ingenuity, like developing a fun Web-based game and emailing to everyone you know (this is also known as viral marketing) hoping that they will then email it to everyone they know, and so on. This form of marketing used to be deployed by only small business. But today even large corporations like Burger King utilize guerrilla marketing and viral video to create all kinds of excitement with people all over the world."

As you begin to formulate your company's marketing program and supporting tactics, you should always look at initiatives in the guerrilla marketing (i.e., low-cost, but still effective, communications tactics) arena that can potentially help your business, and generate sales, new business leads, brand awareness, and other forms of visibility.