While rummaging through my office library shelves last week in search of a weighty but elusive reference book that I had mislaid, I stumbled over my dog-eared copy of Jay Conrad Levinson’s cracking 1984 best seller ‘Guerrilla Marketing’ that I remember queuing for at a San Francisco bookstore.
Levinson’s assertive approach to maximising revenue generation and return on marketing investment using unconventional means was an intellectual breath of fresh air and an inspiration to a new generation of SMEs trying to elbow their way into a crowded market at the dawn of the digital age. The one thing that Levinson did was to force businesses to recognise that there were more routes to market than using mass advertising to facilitate mass distribution, and that smaller players could outflank bigger competitors through ‘thinking outside the box.’
Now some 25 years later I found myself reflecting on the impact that guerrilla marketing has made on the aspiration and achievement of today’s business talent and the extent to which the concept has changed the armoury of the new generation of entrepreneurs. In order to test this I raised the topic of marketing strategy with a handful of young twenty something entrepreneurs around a lunch table and invited them to differentiate their views on conventional versus non conventional marketing. Their responses surprised me.
One or two were of the view that in today’s global market SMEs could only achieve sustainable growth through being technologically advanced while others argued that companies needed to be service driven as one could never really compete with multinationals on technology. Another in our company suggested that today’s challenge is really about business positioning. “Get the model right and you’ve got it made,” he suggested.
Amidst these differing corporate perspectives I found that trying to tease out views on marketing focus proved to be difficult, thus I changed tack and asked what each of them are doing to advance their business in their market. Of the two ‘service driven’ advocates, one said that she was using a call centre to find customers and sell her products while the other had developed a web site but sales were disappointing. He only got into this because he couldn’t get a job.
The two ‘technologically advanced’ advocates agreed that the Internet was the only way to go but weren’t confident that it can necessarily deliver sustainable sales as it is competing with companies with much bigger budgets! However the fifth entrepreneur disagreed with everyone by suggesting that marketing success can only come through establishing a prominent brand and that was difficult to achieve through Internet promotion alone. ‘Interesting view,’ I thought but realised that I was treading through treacle.
“Look,” I said, “what I’m trying to get at here is the extent to which you believe that using radically different psychology based marketing tactics can advance your business at the expense of your competitors. We call it guerrilla marketing. Ever heard of Jay Conrad Levinson?”
They clearly hadn’t. Then one of our number felt suddenly inspired: “You mean different things to what we’ve been doing? Like TV and radio advertising and stuff? That’s cool.”
I saw myself mentally placing Levinson back on my bookshelf.
Michael Maguire
With a membership network across 130 countries, the Chartered Institute of Marketing is the world's largest organisation for professional marketers and plays a primary role in training, developing and representing the profession.
