10 Mind-blowing Guerilla Marketing Examples to Drive Your Sales
The primary objective of every business is to promote its product or service and earn the maximum possible return. And to achieve this, you keep trying new marketing techniques every day. But what you haven’t stumbled upon yet is guerilla marketing.
Guerilla marketing is exactly what you need in order to achieve your marketing objectives. It is an unconventional form of marketing that will help you raise brand awareness among audiences without actually interrupting them.
So, let’s get started and look at some of the most amazing marketing guerilla marketing examples!
What Is Guerilla Marketing?
Guerilla marketing is an unconventional yet popular form of marketing that uses certain elements of shock and surprise in order to drive publicity and brand awareness.
The term ‘guerilla marketing’ actually comes from guerilla warfare. Guerilla refers to a small, loosely organized army pitted against a strong, organized force. So, in guerilla marketing, you are the smaller party and you have to fight your competitors with big budgets.
Therefore, guerilla marketing is a set of marketing techniques with a significantly low cost and aims to create a lasting impression on the audiences.
Now, let’s have a look at the various forms of guerilla marketing
Types of Guerilla Marketing
There are four main types of guerilla marketing. They are-
1. Outdoor
Outdoor guerilla marketing refers to the act of placing or displaying something outdoors. It could be anywhere from a busy street, a park, or any other location. This form of marketing is mostly common in urban areas and works in locations with great foot traffic.
2. Indoor
Indoor guerilla marketing takes advantage of public places with an enclosed structure. For example, university campuses, malls, museums, train stations, etc. The marketing tactic can be anything from a flash mob to a large billboard.
3. Event Ambush
Event Ambush guerilla marketing refers to promoting a product or service at a pre-decided event. It could be anything like a concert, a sporting event, or a festival celebration. With a sudden promotional activity at such an event, you catch your audience’s attention and create a lasting impact.
4. Experiential
Experiential guerilla marketing can take place anywhere including indoors and outdoors locations, and at events as well. This form of marketing allows the public to interact with your brand or product. For example, distributing free samples of your product.
Now that we’ve understood the basic types of guerilla marketing, let’s learn how you can set up a guerilla marketing campaign.
How to Set up a Guerilla Marketing Campaign?
Here are some tips for you to create the most effective guerilla marketing campaign strategy-
1. Understand Your Audience and Choose a Location
The first step in setting up a marketing campaign is to identify your target audience and set up your marketing objectives. The nature of your product or service will determine your target audience and help you decide on appropriate locations for your promotional activities. Always remember, location is everything for guerilla marketing.
2. Come Up With an Idea and Technique
Once you’ve understood your audience and decided on a location, it’s time to think of a foolproof idea. Think of an original idea, something that is truly yours, something totally out of the box. People love things that they’ve never seen before and in the case of guerilla marketing, the ‘surprise’ element is your key to success.
3. Execute Your Plan
Once your idea is ready, you need to bring it to fruition. Structurize your plan into well-defined steps and get going! Try to think of cost-effective ways of implementing your plan because the goal is to increase engagement with low costs.
4. Measure Your Results
Finally, after your guerilla marketing campaign finds pace, you can start measuring the results. Compare your current position with the goals you’ve set and you’ll know how far along you have come. This will help you understand where you can make improvements and achieve your goals faster!
Now that we’ve understood the basics of guerrilla marketing, let’s look at some of the most popular guerilla marketing strategies implemented by some famous brands and companies.
10 Best Guerilla Marketing Examples
Here are some mind-blowing guerilla marketing examples to help you understand the concept better-
1. Axe Body Spray
With the use of custom stickers, Axe Body Spray has been able to create a story about the familiar exit man who we see on stickers in nearly all establishments. By attaching a sticker next to the ‘exit man’ one, Axe has used a tinge of creativity and quirkiness to promote their body spray. Here’s an example-
Axe’s guerilla marketing strategy aims to show that the fire exit man is being chased by women after using the Axe body spray.
2. BBC’s Scary Dracula Billboard
When you hear the word “Dracula”, your mind automatically goes to think of the scary creature that appears after nightfall. BBC focused on this simple human behavior and promoted their show “Dracula” by capitalizing on it.
They created a minimalist yet unconventional billboard with red text on a white background and a few bloody stakes. It looked totally normal during the day, but as the night fell, you could see the shadow of a Dracula on the billboard.
The stakes were deliberately placed in order to cast a show on the billboard. This is how it looked-
3. Coca-Cola’s Candid Videos
In this guerilla marketing example, Coca-Cola took sharing to another level. They installed a supersized vending machine at a college. It had a 2-for-1 button at the top, encouraging the students to lift each other up in order to reach the button. On top of this, they installed another gigantic machine dispensing a hot pizza, a sandwich, balloons and a bouquet of flowers.
This led to a lot of excitement among the students on campus. But the best guerilla tactic that Coca-cola applied here was recording the reactions of the students and compiling them into a beautiful candid video for promotional purposes.
4. Knorr’s Interactive Quiz
Knorr, a Unilever-owned food and beverage company, wanted to increase its brand awareness. And to do this, they combined guerilla marketing with trending interactive content marketing to create a personality quiz. This quiz invited users to answer some interesting questions and learn what their favorite food has to say about them.
This quiz was then promoted to relevant target audiences in numerous territories and helped engage consumers at various touchpoints. And to further extend the reach of this campaign, this interactive quiz was also promoted through the brand’s social channels.
5. Deadpool’s Tinder Profile
Tinder users were surprised to see the anti-hero and legend comic character Deadpool show up on their tinder profiles. Ahead of the movie’s Valentine’s Day release, the promoters took the release date a little too seriously.
With some bold pictures and an interesting bio, Deadpool met with his movie-goers prior to the movie’s release. This move didn’t just stay limited to the small subset of Twitter users, but screenshots of Deadpool’s Tinder profile soon made it to numerous social media platforms. Let’s take a look at Deadpool’s Tinder profile-
6. Colgate’s Cavity Campaign
Colgate created toothbrush-shaped popsicle sticks with ‘Don’t forget Colgate’ printed on them and infixed them into ice cream bars and popsicles. The goal was to remind children as well as adults of the importance of brushing in order to avoid cavity build-up. In the process, this helped them promote their brand.
7. Tyskie’s Door Handles
Tyskie, the beer company took guerilla marketing to the next level. By turning normal door handles into Tyskie beer mug handles, the promoters urged the consumers to buy their cold brew beer as they stepped into pubs and clubs. Let’s have a look-
8. UNICEF’s Vending Machine
More than 4000 people die every day because of contaminated water and UNICEF wanted to change this. They used guerilla marketing to create awareness regarding this. In 2009, UNICEF installed a “Dirty Water Vending Machine” in New York’s Union Square. This machine offered a selection of dirty water ranging from malaria, typhoid, and cholera to other diseases plaguing the communities lacking the supply of clean drinking water.
For a donation of $1 to UNICEF’s cause, you could get a bottle of brown unfiltered water with nasty particles floating in it. They informed that every $1 could provide a child with clean drinking water for about 40 days.
9. IKEA’s Innovative Staircase
Staircases are seen all over and IKEA took advantage of this and applied a genius guerilla marketing tactic to advertise their furniture. IKEA inset drawers under staircases to show how IKEA furniture owners can utilize space in their homes.
10. McDonald’s Interactive Billboard
With a unique guerilla marketing strategy, McDonald’s created a tangible and engaging advertising experience for consumers. They installed a digital interactive billboard in the midst of a shopping district in Kuala Lumpur.
For their ‘Save the Sunday Cone’ campaign, they displayed an ice cream sundae cone on the screen which was melting due to the extreme heat of the city. To ‘save’ the melting cone, the users were supposed to spin a giant wheel in order to cool and unmelt it. This could be done using a mobile web browser and in the end, the user received a voucher which could be redeemed at any McDonald’s outlet.
This created a lot of buzz about McDonald’s as they engaged and interacted with consumers in a literal sense through this guerilla tactic.
These were some of the most successful examples of guerilla marketing. Now, before winding up, let’s walk you through the benefits of using this form of marketing.
Why Use Guerilla Marketing?
Here are some reasons why you should definitely include some guerrilla marketing strategies in your marketing campaign.
1. Budget Friendly
Guerilla marketing strategies are generally low-budget and depend on unconventional methods to grab the attention of consumers. Thus, it is a cost-effective way to promote your product and improve brand awareness. Moreover, the unconventional nature of this form of marketing calls for greater focus on imagination than the budget.
2. Appeals to Emotion
By implementing guerilla marketing strategies, you can trigger the emotional quotient of your consumers. Think of a unique marketing idea that your consumers will be able to relate to and get them hooked to your product.
3. Improves Brand Image
With unique and creative guerilla marketing strategies, you can increase your reach and cater to a wider audience. This will not only help you improve your engagement rates, but will also help upgrade your brand image.
4. Builds Strong Relationships
Guerilla marketing focuses on everyday situations and brings about some quirky twists to get the attention of the consumers. In this process, you’ll often collaborate with local businesses and organizations to implement your ideas. You will also be able to directly engage with your consumers. Hence, along with the top-of-the-world promotion, you’ll also be able to build some strong business relationships.
5. Catchy and Shareable
By tapping into experiential marketing techniques, you can trigger the excitement of consumers and create a memorable experience for them. Moreover, if consumers find something exclusive and interesting, they make it a point to share the content with their friends and acquaintances.
Some Guerilla Marketing Best Practices
Conclusion
In this blog, we’ve discussed what guerilla marketing means and how you can use simple situations and turn them into major promotional elements. We hope that you’ve understood enough to start your own guerilla marketing campaign.
You can start by creating an interactive content piece like a fun quiz or a complex calculator in order to increase your reach and promote your brand in the most unique and entertaining way. Try out Outgrow’s no-code interactive content builder and see for yourself how simple the process is!
If you’re too lazy to build your own content, they also have a host of industry-specific premade templates available just for you!
So, what are you waiting for? Sign up for their free trial now!
FAQs
1. Why it is called guerilla marketing?
The term guerilla marketing comes from guerilla warfare which was famous for applying unconventional tactics to achieve simple objectives.
2. What are the basic rules of guerilla marketing?
The basic rules of guerilla marketing are-
a. Research your audience
b. Define your goals
c. Think of a unique idea
d. Be brief
3. What companies use guerrilla marketing?
There are no specific criteria for what kind of companies can use guerrilla marketing. Big companies like Red Bull, Burger King, IKEA, Coca Cola have all used interesting guerrilla marketing tactics to boost their promotional efforts.
