Marketing Guerrillas

If you want to maximize the impact of your marketing dollars, get creative with your marketing. This post shows some interesting marketing campaigns that drew media attention to the products. They aren't necessarily that expensive, either. Sometimes you can set up a compelling photograph (like the sandals shown in the post) and get some media attention with that.

You do have to choose your guerrrilla marketing tactic carefully to embrace and enhance the product positioning; it's not enough to get attention. It has to be the right kind of attention. Think of viral videos... yes, Star Wars Kid got lots of views, but was it really enhancing the way he was perceived? More to the point, you want your marketing efforts to bring positive attention to your product and hopefully make the target more likely to buy.

One of the effective guerrilla marketing tactics I remember well was at the introduction of Champions at Pacific Origins in 1981. We hired a model to wear a Wonder Woman costume (the model was 5' 10" without shoes, and over six feet tall in costume) and hand out flyers about Champions to the attendees as they stood in line to register. It turned out that registration was a mess, and there were several thousand gamers (overwhelmingly male at that point in time) standing in line with nothing to do... except desperately try to get the attention of our model and cheerfully take a flyer. The stunt contributed to the success of Champions at that show (we sold over half the print run at the show).

So try on that guerrilla suit!