Guerrilla Marketing

by Jay Conrad Levinson

Marketing is absolutely every bit of contact any part of your business has with any segment of the public. Guerrillas view marketing as a circle that begins with your ideas for generating revenue and continues on with the goal of amassing a large number of repeat and referral customers. The three keys words in that paragraph are EVERY, REPEAT, and REFERRAL. If your marketing is not a circle, it's a straight line that leads directly into Chapters 7, 11, or 13 in the bankruptcy courts.

HOW IS GUERRILLA MARKETING DIFFERENT FROM TRADITIONAL MARKETING?

Guerrilla marketing means marketing that is unconventional, non- traditional, not by-the-book, and extremely flexible. Ten factors make it different from old-fashioned marketing:

1. Instead of investing money in the marketing process, you invest time, energy, and imagination.
2. Instead of using guesswork in your marketing, you use the science of psychology, laws of human behavior.
3. Instead of concentrating on traffic, responses, or gross sales, profits are the only yardstick by which you measure your marketing.
4. Instead of being oriented to companies with limitless bank accounts, guerrilla marketing is geared to small business.
5. Instead of ignoring customers once they've purchased, you have a fervent devotion to customer follow-up.
6. Instead of intimidating small business owners, guerrilla marketing removes the mystique from the entire marketing process, clarifies it.
7. Instead of competing with other businesses, guerrilla marketing preaches the gospel of cooperation, urging you to help others and let them help you.
8. Instead of trying to make sales, guerrillas are dedicated to making relationships, for long-term relationships are paramount in the nineties.
9. Instead of believing that single marketing weapons such as advertising work, guerrillas know that only marketing combinations work.
10. Instead of encouraging you to advertise, guerrilla marketing provides you with 100 different marketing weapons; advertising is only one of them.

These are ten very critical differences and are probably the reasons that the concept of guerrilla marketing has filled a void in the world's economy, explaining why the guerrilla books (GUERRILLA MARKETING, GUERRILLA MARKETING ATTACK, GUERRILLA MARKETING WEAPONS, GUERRILLA MARKETING EXCELLENCE, GUERRILLA FINANCING, GUERRILLA SELLING, GUERRILLA ADVERTISING (June, l994) and GUERRILLA MARKETING HANDBOOK (November l994)) have been translated into 33 languages, sold over one million copies, are required reading in most MBA programs, are available in audiotape and videotape versions, as computer software, as a nationally-syndicated column, as a newsletter, and are the most popular and widely-read marketing books in the world.