What is Guerilla Marketing?

Guerrilla marketing is an unconventional way of performing marketing activities on a very low budget.

The advantages and disadvantages of Guerilla Marketing

Advantage

Guerrilla marketing is cheap. At the high end, you may end up investing a few hundred dollars in promotional items or a major, centralized piece that you can build a number of different campaigns around. At the low end, it’s free and you can’t beat free!

• In addition to growing your business, guerrilla marketing involves networking, both with your customers and with other businesses. In the process of executing and maintaining your campaign, you will make a lot of new friends and allies.
• Guerrilla marketing is specifically tailored to meet the needs of small businesses, whereas traditional advertising venues are complicated and expensive to the point of exclusion (bordering on snobbishness).
• Many aspects of creative guerrilla marketing campaigns are just plain fun! You get to perform wacky stunts and engage in unusual activities, all in the name of working for a living.
• Guerrilla marketing works. If you do your research, plan your campaign, and stick with it, you will more than likely end up with a better and more profitable business.

Disadvantage

Guerrilla marketing works, but it is not completely fail safe. It is, after all, advertising, which is far from an exact science. The number of variables involved in advertising guarantees that nothing is 100 percent effective.

• As with any advertising campaign, you will not be able to pinpoint exactly what works and what does not. Obtaining measurable results is difficult (but not impossible, unlike other marketing techniques).
• Guerrilla marketing requires a greater level of dedication and energy than traditional advertising venues, which often consist of throwing large amounts of money at other people to do the work for you.
• If you are looking for a quick fix, guerrilla marketing is not your solution. You will not see instant or overnight results stemming from your efforts. An investment of time is required in order to achieve your business sales goals.
• Guerrilla marketing is not for the thin-skinned or faint of heart. At the very least, you will have a few detractors who find fault in your methods. At worst, you may be threatened with legal action (which is why it’s so important to check your local laws before engaging in a guerilla marketing campaign).

Shengli-the first company to use Guerrilla Marketing

Shengli Beer Company, located in Guangzhou, is the first company in China use Guerrilla marketing.
Because of its ordinary taste and unattractive package, Shengli's target market used to focus on middle age people. However, in 2001, when Shengli was trying to promote its new product to young people, the president of Shengli found out that there was a new marketing strategy-guerrilla marketing being widely used in western country. therefore, he decided to put away all the traditional advertising and start to implement guerrilla marketing.
They created a new strange and ugly cartoon character named Sammy. its personality is similar with what today's young people have, a little simple-minded, mischievous, selfish and pure. They wrote a series of stories that reflect young people's life by using this cartoon character, and then send to all people they know via e-mails. Just two days, most of college and university students
began to talk about this cartoon character. According to the research report that Shengli did in that year, almost 98% of young people from 18 years old to 24 years old had known this cartoon and Shengli beer. These young people not only downloaded it as desktop wallpaper but also used its image to make masques, printers and the like for different parties.
Fortunately, after just 4 months, the sales of Shengli beer had achieved about 68% of its estimated annual sales.

Current situation of Guerrilla Marketing in China

Guerrilla marketing is now a very effective marketing weapon for business to attract people's attention at low cost and increase market share at short time, but it is a quite new marketing tool for Chinese market.
Recently, less than 50% of Chinese companies are using guerrilla marketing as their one of marketing strategies, and most of them are multinational companies in China. Also, there are many small business in China even do not know what this marketing tool is. However, this situation is changing and improving now. Guerrilla marketing becomes one of lecture material in all Chinese colleges/universities. Books about Gurrilla marketing are now available in any bookstores in China, so people have more opportunities to learn this new strategy. Moreover, during recent 2 years, ebooks are prevailing in China, so many ebooks of Gurrilla marketing are published online, including the Chinese version and English version.
Although Guerrilla marketing in China is gradually developing to a good direction, there are still have some differences of implementing this tool in China and western countries. For instance, because of Chinese culture, most of Chinese consumers are very conservative. Therefore, business people in China cannot use very exaggerating technique to create attractive advertisements, such as put a bleeding broken arm with a chocolate bar in their Ads. If they do, it is possible that government will prohibit this kind of advertisements.
Guerrilla Marketing in China is quite young, but it may stimulate Chinese potential market, and lead all Chinese businessman to learn a new concept: The marketing objective is not to gain market share, it is to gain mind share.

Examples of Guerrilla Marketing in China

This is what NGOs used Guerrilla marketing to help us visualize the volume of harmful CO2 emitted daily by traditional modes of transportation.
The motor of this car is kept running for a whole day. An inflatable balloon is attached to the exhaust pipe.

At the end of the day, a huge black cloud is floating in the air, carrying the message: “Look how much carbon monoxide you’ll keep out of the air we breathe by not driving for just one day."A truth that is not surprising, but the action is impressive. The objective is to get the one message into people’s heads: Let’s act!

This advertising is called "Sweat Under Control", published in Shanghai, China.
This Ad was posted on the wall of public washroom, and got people's attention about excessive sweating.

This advertising was posted on the wall of one of Yoga Centers in China.
It is very interactive, and let people be curious about Yoga, and think about what it really is.

This is one of largest consumer electronics enterprises in China used guerrilla marketing to promote its new product line-Laptop in 2005. They organized 2,000 people to hold TCL ad billboards to walk around the street.

In 2004, HP fixed its printer models on the wall of public washrooms in Nanjing to attract people's attention. They used Guerrilla marketing to promote their high quality printer-you will print out all the things that exactly as what you see by using HP printers.