Guerrilla Marketing

Most people who have taken a history course know what Guerrilla Warfare is. It is a style of warfare usually employed by small groups of fighters, that use whatever tactics are necessary to gain an edge over their usually larger adversaries. Guerrilla fighters take advantage of their terrain and use their mobility to weaken opposing forces.

                           

Che Guevara (top) and the American Minutemen (bottom) both employed guerrilla tactics when fighting their adversaries. 

Guerrilla warfare and marketing share a few key concepts. They are both about winning people over. In both cases, taking your enemy (or customer) by surprise is a guaranteed way to win their attention; hence the birth of Guerrilla Marketing.

In its essence, guerrilla marketing is about surprising your customer, and having a memorable impact on them when they don't expect it. Guerrilla marketing takes many forms; almost any unconventional marketing ploy separate from traditional marketing mediums (TV, print, radio, billboards) could be considered a guerrilla marketing campaign. 

Guerrilla marketing can be separated into five major categories: ambient marketing, ambush marketing, stealth marketing, viral marketing, and street marketing. There are also smaller subcategories, but most guerrilla marketing campaigns fall under one of these four.

Ambient marketing advertises products by placing itself where customers would not expect to see an advertisement. These advertisements usually have some connection to the environment they are in, giving them a deeper meaning.

This advertisement is for a boxing website, and it features a boxing bell on the wall of a public space. Since a customer doesn't expect it to be there, it immediately catches their attention.

An effective ambient marketing strategy is to feature over-sized or under-sized products; these out-of-the-ordinary products interest people and make them more attentive to the ad. 

To the average passerby, something like this would catch their attention and create a memorable experience that they would relate to the product being advertised. 

Ambush marketing is seen less than ambient marketing, but it is no less effective. Ambush marketing is the tactic of placing advertisement in events, where the event itself has no official connection with the company advertising there. Take this example of ambush marketing by Abercrombie and Fitch:

They placed their advertisements in one of President Obama's filmed speeches without having any official connection with the Obama Campaign. 

Another famous example of this took place during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. Although Reebok was the official sponsor of the games, Nike created a memorable and now-famous ambush marketing campaign. They lined the streets surrounding the Olympic Stadium with Nike Ads, and created a custom pair of gold Nike track shoes for Olympiad Michael Johnson. 

This picture shows Michael Johnson toting his gold medals, along with his gold Nikes, in an ad that would become one of the most famous examples of ambush marketing. 

Stealth Marketing is a tactic of guerrilla marketing that allows a company to promote its product in a market without the public knowing that they are promoting their product in a market. 

Take for example Sony Ericsson's promotion of its T68i camera phone. 

Looks complicated.

Sony Ericsson promoted its new camera feature for the T68i by hiring actors to pose as tourists. They visited public places, and asked passers-bye to take pictures of them. They used a T68i and showed the people how to use the camera. What they were attempting to do was promote their product by using word-of-mouth to enter the camera-phone market. The marketing campaign was a success, and a perfect example of stealth marketing: the people who were being shown the camera phones didn't even know they were part of an advertisement. 

Viral marketing is the promotion of a product, place, or idea through the spread of an advertisement by the public. Most viral marketing takes place on social media, the most popular way of sharing things on the internet. 

Red Bull is a great example of a company that employs viral marketing campaigns. They recently sponsored the world's tallest skydive, with the diver jumping from so high that he needed to wear a spacesuit.

Viral marketing is effective because it spreads without having to actually promote the product, and it can be very cheap while still being effective.

Street Marketing is also an example of guerrilla marketing that most people are very familiar with.

Free samples, anyone?

Street marketing is any marketing that takes place mainly in the street. Examples of this are free samples, flyers, or public events. An old type of street marketing, which is making a comeback due to its retro appeal, are advertisements on matchbooks. 

Matchbook ads were very popular in the early 1920's, and many of them are vintage collectibles today. One type of street marketing which has become a phenomenon in Japan is Tissue-pack marketing. Tissue-pack marketing was created in the 1960's by a Japanese paper company looking to increase the demand for paper products. The creator, Hiroshi Mori, came upon disposable tissue-packs as a replacement for matchbooks that would appeal to a larger customer base. Tissue-packs are an effective advertising medium because they have functionality to the customer, as opposed to flyers, which are often thrown away. 

These are the five main categories of guerrilla marketing: ambient, ambush, stealth, viral, and street. Each serves its own purpose and uses different mediums of promotion. What they all have in common is that they catch the customer's attention in an unconventional way. Guerrilla marketing is effective because it makes an impression on the customer in a way that other conventional advertisements can't. Like all marketing, its goal is to make the customer aware of the advertisement in order to promote its product, place, or idea. Guerrilla marketing campaigns are some of the most creative marketing campaigns out there, and like guerrilla warfare, it is necessary to think outside the box in order for them to be effective. 

Seasonal Advertising

Here on the east coast, it's been a long winter, but it looks like it's finally coming to an end. Most of the snow has melted, the sun is shining, and the temperatures are above 0°F. It's officially been spring for a few days now, and most people are excited to finally spend some time outside. Every season emotionally affects people, and seasonal advertising is a strategy that marketers use to tap into people's emotions at a certain time of year.

If you happen to watch videos on Youtube, you know that 10-second, 15-second and 30-second ads are commonplace. At this time of the year, it is unlikely that you will see an ad that features snow, or any imagery of winter that isn't focused on the beginning of spring. It's the time of the year that people don't even want to think about winter. They would rather see green grass and sunshine, since spring is right around the corner.

I found these two ads on Youtube and Facebook, respectively. Both advertisements have similar color schemes, with a lot of green, light blue, and white. Spring is mostly associated with green, since all the plants are blooming, along with the blue skies and clouds. They both also have a lot of sunlight, something that people are looking forward to after winter. 

Many people get sad when fall comes, and the greenery that was just blooming is starting to die off for winter.The end of summer is also the beginning of a new school year, and another year of studying is starting for a lot of people. Clothing ads are very common in the late summer and fall, which are associated with the beginning of a new working year. 

This Best Buy commercial, aimed at college students (or their parents), shows a hardworking college kid who is going to take advantage of the new school year and take every opportunity that he can get. It plays on people's emotions, since a lot of people are really gung ho at the beginning of a school year, and then things tend to slow down when the weather changes. 

For many people in the world, and definitely in the Northeast, winter is associated with "the grind". It's cold, and you just want it to be spring, but there is still a long way to go until the temperature goes up. Many winter advertisements focus on giving people something to look forward to during the most depressing months. Christmas is a huge holiday that has an emotional impact on people right at the beginning of winter.

This late 90's Coke ad has everything that many consider to be Christmas-y. Family bonding, inclusiveness, sharing, etc. Christmas ads are very popular until right after Christmas, when the Christmas spirit suddenly disappears and is replaced by New Years Resolutions and a focus on self-improvement and self-discipline. There is also a focus on working hard, probably to distract yourself until it is warm enough to do things again. 

This Nike ad from 2014 is a great example; it clearly embodies self discipline and the fact that staying active will keep you from getting depressed over the winter. This is also shown in the ending, which contrasts the normal people on "the grind" vs the runner who is making the most out of his winter. 

Many ads that use seasonal advertising appeal to the same basic emotions that people feel throughout the year. It is an effective way to appeal to a widespread amount of people, since the weather and seasons affect all of us similarly. The next time you're on Youtube or watching TV, watch the ads and see how many of them use seasonal advertising, even if they use it subtly. 

Dan Cobley: What Physics Taught Me About Marketing

For this blog post, I will be doing a summary and review of Dan Cobley's Ted Talk, What Physics Taught Me About Marketing. Dan Cobley is the marketing director for Google in northern and central Europe. Dan Cobley received his first degree in Physics from Oxford University, although he has worked in marketing his entire career. In his Ted Talk, he relates four theories of physics to four ideas in marketing. These four theories are,
1) Newton's Law of Acceleration
2) Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle
3) The Scientific Method
4) The Law of Increasing Entropy

Here is a Youtube link to the talk, or you can view it on the Ted website here.
 

1)  The first theory of physics he talks about is Newton's Law of Acceleration. Newton's law of acceleration states that force is equal to mass times acceleration (f=ma). Therefore, acceleration is equal to force divided by mass (a=f/m). Acceleration is a factor of how much force you put into an object that has a certain mass. The more powerful the force, the more powerful the acceleration. The bigger the mass, the less powerful the acceleration. Small things take less force to accelerate than big things. Dan Cobley relates this to marketing by putting companies in the place of the mass. If you are a large company, you already have an image out there that customers relate you with. However, the bigger the company, the harder it is to change the image of the company. In this case, changing the image of the company would be related to the acceleration of the object. He gives the example of Hoover company, which was well known for producing vacuum cleaners, attempting to create a line of washing machines. Since Hoover was already imaged as a vacuum cleaner company, customers were hesitant to purchase a Hoover washing machine. Since Hoover specializes in vacuums, they wouldn't be as competent with washing machines as a company that specialized in washing machines. This is the reason brands like Unilever use smaller sub-companies to market their wide array of products. Unilever owns Dove hair care products, as well as Hellman's mayonnaise. If you were going to buy shampoo, would you reach for the Hellmenn's, or would you go for a brand like Dove that is a staple name in hair care products? I would personally choose Dove. The smaller companies that each market a different type of product have less mass than using one name for all of a companies products, therefore making it easier to change the image of the company from the customer's perspective.

Unilever owns all of these brands. Customers would rather buy Breyers Ice Cream, Skippy Peanut Butter and Suave shampoo than a bunch of different products that are all the same brand.

2)  The second theory he talks about is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: it is impossible to view a particle in its natural position, because the act of observing the particle moves it from its natural position. If you shine a light on a particle in order to observe it, it's going to move. Anything you do in proximity to the particle will move it from it's natural position. It's like the question, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? He relates this to the habits of customers. If a customer knows that they're being observed, then they are not going to act naturally. Just the knowledge that they are being observed will cause them to deviate from their natural habits in some way. In order to observe a customer's natural habits, they can't know that they are being observed. 

People act differently when they think no one is watching. This is very relevant to Dan Cobley and his position in Google. Millions of people use Google everyday, and whether they are aware of it or not, Google observes and tracks internet habits for every one of its users. Those who are aware act differently because of it (that's why they invented incognito mode, another breakthrough invention by Google).

3) The next theory he talks about is the scientific method. The scientific method states that you cannot prove a hypothesis through observation, you can only disprove it. Take for example the theory of spontaneous generation, which was a passable theory for thousands of years. This theory stated that life was created from things like mud, dirt, and rotting meat being exposed to sunlight. There was a ton of evidence for this, like maggots coming out of nowhere on pieces of meat. It wasn't until later that scientists, using stricter tests, proved this hypothesis wrong. Rotting meat in a sealed container produced no maggots. Contrary to all the prior evidence, one fact disproved the whole hypothesis. Dan relates this to the image that a company has in its customer's minds. A company can do as much as possible to give itself an image in its customers minds, but it only takes one action to destroy that image. Think of BP, which marketed itself as a very Eco-friendly oil company. Now think about the BP oil spill and the way the company handled it; it was the opposite of eco-friendly. Ever since then, no one thinks of BP as "that eco-friendly oil company". They spent a lot of time and money creating this image, and screwed up once and toppled it. If you are in charge of a company, any action that you take (or don't take) can have a huge affect on the image of your company in customer's minds. 

4) The last theory he talks about is the theory of increasing entropy. Entropy is things moving towards chaos, so the theory of increasing entropy is the theory that things will always move towards chaos. Over time, things will become more and more chaotic. This is related to the marketing of product in the public sphere. Once you market something, you put it out into the public to get a reaction from it. Hopefully, people will react to it how you want them to; but you can never be certain where exactly this marketing campaign will go in the minds of the customers. When you put something out there, it will move towards chaos as more and more people react to it differently. Take Coke as an example. In the 1980's, they switched their Classic Coke product out for New Coke. Based on taste tests, New Coke would be far more popular than Classic Coke. When they finally made the switch, however, people reacted in the exact opposite way they had planned. They stockpiled Classic Coke, and demanded that Classic Coke be put back on the market. Coke could do two things: either bring back Classic Coke due to popular demand, or remain on their warpath of selling New Coke. Obviously, they brought back Classic Coke, because people would probably have boycotted them if they got rid of it. Once something is released to the market, it is highly beneficial for the company to pay attention to customer feedback, even if the product released has the opposite affect from what you intended. By being aware of customer's reactions, it will put you at a marketing advantage as opposed to if you ignore customer reactions and continue with your original plan. By being aware of how you're customers react and reacting to them, it brings you closer to your customers in the end.

Dan Cobley uses his background in physics to view marketing principles in a different light. These principles are relevant to anything marketing related, and pretty relevant when dealing with people in general. This talk is really a marketing talk; the only hard science he talks about is Newton's law of acceleration. Even though it is a marketing talk, bringing physics into it bridges the relationship between the two sciences. After all, marketing is a science; the science of having an affect on the people you are trying to influence. There are examples of these theories everywhere, and they aren't limited to the world of advertising.

Controversial Commercials

In my first blog post I talked about St. Ides advertising campaign and the controversy that surrounded it. For this post, I will be discussing another industry that has a history of pushing the envelope when it comes to breaking social taboos: the fashion industry. Calvin Klein, in particular, is known for having some of the most risqué advertising campaigns of all time. Sex in advertising has a lot of gray area, but it is also one of the most powerful selling tools of all time. In the fashion industry especially, sex is important because the success of the product itself is directly related to its sex appeal. Calvin Klein, the fashion designer who created the clothing line Calvin Klein, is famous for his use of sex in marketing his products. He even said that, "Jeans are about sex. The abundance of bare flesh is the last gasp of advertisers trying to give redundant products a new identity"(Wikipedia). Klein's use of sexuality in order to sell jeans is infamous.
How about the ads featuring Brooke Shields from the 1980's?

Nothing too racy, unless you consider that Brooke was 15 when these ads brought her to stardom.

Nowadays, these ads probably would cause something of stir, since they feature an underage girl and undeniable sexual undertones. Think about the impact they had in the 1980's.
If you want racy, check out some of Calvin Klein's ads for their "Obsession" fragrance line from the mid-1980's.

 

Yes, this advertisement, targeted towards men, features a bunch of naked women that almost shows too much for it to not be porn. Over time, the sexuality of the ads differed based on the product being sold; some had mild sexual undertones, while other were pretty much just sex with a Calvin Klein logo on it.

You might not want to look at that at work. As these ads persisted, the company was always looking for new ways to push the envelope even more. After hiring Kate Moss for an advertising campaign, Calvin Klein ushered in a whole new style that went hand-in-hand with the grunge scene of the early 90's.

This was Kate Moss' "waif" look, which highly contrasted the tall, curvy models that were popular in the late 80's (see Cindy Crawford, Elle Macpherson, etc). Also known as "heroin chic" (like the drug), the style emphasized angular features, pale skin, and a certain level of androgyny. Of course, the ads sparked controversy, including damnation of Calvin Klein's ads by Bill Clinton. Around this time Marky Mark came on the scene as another CK model that would be catapulted to movie stardom thanks to the publicity of his ads.

 

This commercial is just as sexually suggestive as any other Calvin Klein ad that came before it, but Mark Wahlberg also mentions Calvins as being protection from AIDS. AIDS was a very controversial topic when these ads came out, and the whole purpose of Marky Mark mentioning it was to stir the pot, making Calvin Klein seem that much more edgy.

 So, these are all examples of Calvin Klein being historically promiscuous. What happens when that promiscuity goes over the line, and is interpreted differently by the public? For firsthand evidence of this, take a look at CK's controversial, highly sexual, and honestly pretty creepy advertising campaign in the 90's. 

You don't have to watch the whole video to get the idea of the commercials. They are in a 90's looking basement, with a ladder, and these young looking teens are being interviewed by an old-sounding man who is filming their responses with a handheld camera. Most of the models are scantily clad, and a lot of the questions the guy is asking them are downright weird. These commercials were released along with the promotional posters, which were featured on billboards and city buses.

 

 The posters aren't anything preposterous (as far as CK goes), but the commercials are stretching it a little. Calvin Klein was apparently going for an amateur-porn-actor type commercial, which would surely shock and awe anyone who saw them. What they got, however, were a bunch of people thinking the ads were a play on child pornography and an FBI investigation into child porn charges. The actors were all above legal age, so there were no charges, but CK dropped the ad campaign after three weeks due to the controversy that surrounded it. In my professional opinion as a marketing student, I think that CK was trying to be a little too controversial. Amateur porn is one thing, but underage porn is a whole other thing; not many companies would choose to associate themselves with that kind of subject matter. For more examples of CK overstepping their bounds, check out their ad that got pulled due its rape-like imagery. 

So, all in all, one thing that you should take away from this critical analysis of Calvin Klein's controversial advertising is that controversy sells. And so does sex. Whatever the medium for an advertisement to reach the customer, anything that can separate your ad from the competition's will increase its popularity and make your product more popular. CK is an example of the phrase, "any publicity is good publicity." Sure, some of their ads featured teens in basements that seemed like they were filmed by a serial killer, but in the end, it related two things into the customers minds: Calvin Klein, and sex. The controversy surrounding them got them even more publicity. It should also be known that the fashion industry can get away with a lot more than many other industries, mainly because the fashion industry is all about sex appeal in the first place. If you are interested in Calvin Klein's ads throughout history, you can check out the historical timeline of their advertisements. The next time you see an ad that you think is a little racy or a little offensive, remember that it's a marketing technique aimed at doing one thing: putting the product in the customer's mind.