One of the buzz terms for creating demand is Guerilla Marketing, first talked about by Jay Conrad Levinson in the mid-1980s but now really “in”.  Just search the net with these key words and you’ll see what I mean.

It is essentially the low cost, high impact innovative marketing that many of us marketing and communications professionals have been doing for years!  The underlying message is – think and act outside of the box.

According to Levinson: “It is up to the guerrilla marketer to be creative and devise unconventional methods of promotion. The marketer must use all of his or her contacts, both professional and personal, and must examine his company and its products, looking for sources of publicity. Many forms of publicity can be very inexpensive, others are free.”

While Guerilla Marketing stresses free or low-cost marketing concepts and practices, to be successful they require serious, critical thought.  To do it well, you need to have a clear understanding of the overall identity of your company or organization, and what you are trying to achieve. 

Inline with overall strategy

You need to create an identity for your business that tells people who you are and what your product or service means to you.  This encompasses:

• Having an appropriate name
• Standardizing your key messages
• Defining your target audiences and markets
• Assessing the look and feel of your marketing materials, sales collateral and signage to ensure they are in line with your overall strategy
• Motivating employee presentation (attire, neatness, smiles) and attitudes - can’t have happy customers without happy employees
• Generally being easy to do business with
• Maximizing contact with customers and potential buyers or constituents.

Southwest Airlines is probably one of the best examples of guerilla marketing done well.  They started with standardization of their fleet and their corporate look, including highly recognizable colors, on land and in the air; introduced fun, comfortable uniforms; encouraged their employees to enjoy themselves and be customer focused; they introduced fun and innovative promotions to get customers involved; there is always somebody who answers the phone, usually trained in the art of how to handle a customer; the executives, specifically the CEO Herb Kohler would help the flight attendants with drinks service when he was on a flight - understanding what’s going on in the business; they painted one of their planes like Shamu from SeaWorld to draw attention to their service to San Antonio.  I’m sure many of you can think of other creative promotions they have done to ensure that people keep coming back.

Let’s take a look at some of these elements:

The name

The name of an organization, business or project is the first tool to capture people’s attention.  Ideally, it needs to be positive, with no negative connotations; be easy to remember, pronounce and spell.  It should also describe the business or convey the identity of what or who is being marketed – a great example of that is Jiffy Lube.  If you have the choice, it should not be confusing, and should not limit expansion.

Trans Texas Airways faced this challenge when they wanted to go national.  The name was fine when they were operating inside the state of Texas but when they expanded and acquired Continental Airlines they changed their name to Continental because it made more sense.   There are exceptions of course as Southwest Airlines seems to be doing a dynamic job of expanding its business throughout the US, without seeing the necessity to change its name.

I must stress that it is not always possible to avoid names with negative connotations.  This is where truly innovative marketing techniques become even more important.  My advice is that, generally, if a name already has strong recognition, even if it may have some negative perceptions, you should seriously consider keeping it.  You may have to work a bit harder but, once you breakthrough the perceptions the results seem to be far greater.

The Long Island wine industry faced this dilemma.  People couldn’t accept that there was anything other than houses and potatoes on Long Island, so questioned how quality wine could possibly be grown there.  The quandary, which created plenty of discussion as we began to market the region, was should Long Island Wine Country be changed to some other name – East End Wine Country for example - to get away from the negative perceptions. 

Long Island Wine Country was a mark that had been used for a long time so we persuaded the ‘dissidents’ to let us keep going.  At the end of the day, through shear doggedness and creativity, we established Long Island Wine Country as a desirable vacation destination and Long Island wines are now accepted in the wine trade as excellent wine. 

Another great client of mine in Washington State, the City of Auburn, also had the name challenge many years ago!  Its original name was Slaughter, named after a William Slaughter.  In 1893 a group of settlers from Auburn, New York settled there and renamed the city, Auburn.  Yet, to this day, people still mention its original name, usually in a derogatory way.  Add to this an image of being known as an industrial town, where there is nothing to do, and you can see the challenges that the City has to overcome to encourage economic development and tourism.

Messages

The City of Auburn’s tagline “More than you imagine” clearly lends itself to the marketing and communications efforts currently under way to promote the City’s economic development and tourism. 

Despite the fact that Auburn has Class A race track Emerald Downs, White River Amphitheatre live music venue, Pacific Raceways, Muckleshoot Casino, and the SuperMall, along with an historic downtown core that distinguishes it from other cities, the perception is that there is nothing to do there.  When people learn about what Auburn has to offer they say “I would never have imagined” and, judging by the growing interest in the City, peaks their curiosity to find out more.

The Washington wine industry was faced with a perception challenge – how can one grow good quality grapes if it rains all the time (people didn’t know about Washington’s best kept secret – the arid eastern part of the state) and there was also confusion about the impossibility of growing grapes along the Potomac River in Washington (DC!)
We launched a new campaign in 2005 with the tagline “Washington State – The Perfect Climate for Wine”, designed to address those two misperceptions and this tagline and new logo permeated through everything the Washington Wine Commission did going forward.

Tactics

The emphasis must be on creative, low cost activities, which produce effective results.

Thanks

Traditional tactics such as thanking journalists after they have published or covered something you have pitched to them can go along way to ensuring future coverage.  You’d be amazed at how few PR people do that.

Internet

An effective but time consuming practice is to trawl the internet to ensure that your organization or business is included on related sites and, if so, represented correctly.  If not, request inclusion, providing the relevant, tailored information. 

Dealing with blogs, and other social networks presents major challenges for today’s marketing community.  Guerilla tactics (the above board ones!) work well in an environment where people are hungry for information, are capable of multi-tasking but have short attention spans.  Creating word-of-mouth referrals in these areas is huge.  Be warned though, don’t go into this area without being sure you understand what you’re getting into, because if you don’t you will soon be overwhelmed and the process will become counter-productive.

Strategic partnerships

Development of strategic partnerships is a big one for me.  If you base it on a win-win proposition so that they don’t cost a lot, if anything, they will have far greater impact than if you had done the promotion on your own. 

I recently organized a 10th anniversary concert for the Auburn Symphony Orchestra (ASO) at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.  We had some amazing sponsors, some of whom contributed financially and others who gave in-kind support.   One of those was the Pacific Northwest Ballet (PNB), whose music director is ASO’s co-founder and music director Stewart Kershaw and with whose orchestra many of the ASO musicians play.  It was a win-win – we got to tap into their marketing and PR expertise and contacts and they got to promote the ballet to audiences who might not otherwise come to Seattle.

The Auburn Tourism Board is developing a strategic marketing and communications to promote the entertainment and arts activities available for visitors there.  It will be based on low-cost strategic partnerships, both within the tourism industry, the community and other related organizations such as Sound Transit and the Seattle Convention & Visitors Bureau.

Simple

To raise awareness of Long Island wine and encourage Long Island and New York restaurants to have LI wines on their menus, we introduced a business card which had the Long Island Wine Country logo on one side and on the other it said “We enjoyed the meal … We’d love to see Long Island wine on your menu” and gave the website.  We ordered 1,000 of them not realizing how successful this promotion would be. 

In the end a further 75,000 cards were ordered and politicians like New York Senator Hillary Clinton, wine industry celebrities like Kevin Zraly, and other general supporters of the Long Island wine industry were carrying them.  We weren’t able to measure the direct impact of this campaign because we did not have the resources to track it and people were able to go directly to our website. But based on the requests for the cards and the few restaurants we know responded to the cards, it achieved its goal of getting people involved.

We introduced a similar program at the Washington Wine Commission; this time there were two cards – one asking them to consider placing the wine on their menus and the other thanking them for having Washington wine on their menus.

Auburn Tourism Board will implement unusual programs, like giving presentations to their Auburn area business, service and homeowners groups on what Auburn has to offer visitors, to encourage word-of-mouth referrals.  In addition, they are developing auction packages for charity events in their target markets, which will help the charity and will raise awareness of Auburn as a great place to visit.
Capitalize on existing events

Capitalize on events in which you are already participating, such as trade shows.  Send out notices to prospective clients and media prior to the show, notifying them of your booth number and arranging appointments in advance.  The same should happen with media attending the show – send the news story to them prior to the show but keep some of the meat until the actual day – it will peak their interest and encourage them to attend your press briefing and visit your booth.  Also find out who else will be there and see if you can’t do something with them jointly.

New York State’s “I love New York” campaign partners with the NYC Convention & Visitors Bureau NYC& Co. with a stand at the international travel & tourism show in Berlin each year.  The Long Island Wine Council approached NYC&Co. to ask if they would serve only LI or New York State wine at any events they might have at the show and agreed to donate wine for a major dinner being held at the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) exhibition in Berlin.  The result was inclusion of the logo in all their materials and a free booth space for Long Island Wine Country on their stand, something the Council could never have afforded.  Media contacts were made that resulted in coverage of Long Island Wine Country as a tourism destination and NYC&Co. uses New York wine when they promote the city.

Unusual

In an article on entrepreneur.com in February Al Lautenslager gave some fun examples of guerilla marketing in action.  One was to stage a protest for “good customer service”, with picketers outside your place of business holding picket signs that read something like, "We're protesting good customer service at this location!" or "This place is full of nice people interested in customers!".  He emphasized that consistency and focus are key in guerilla marketing, as is repetition, and suggested you should repeat ideas often in order to get noticed and also to create on-going publicity opportunities.

Check list

• Focus on name
• Standardize corporate look from vehicles to uniforms, and marketing materials
• Develop an identity, which is not contrived and false
• Identify and focus on your market niche – know who to target and who the competition is
• Research the colors you choose for your marketing as color influences people’s choices
• Create a distinctive logo to aid in identifying your company, organization or brand
• Involve your employees in the process so they can communicate effectively and will be enthusiastic, one of the most powerful influencers – a word of caution, this must come from the top!
• Provide the necessary communication from employee awareness of programs through to telephone and sales training - top salesmen use special words and phrases; best training involves memorizing pitches because only then will key words and phrases be used.
• Be easy to do business with because customer satisfaction inspires word of mouth referrals, the most effective form of advertising and the least expensive.  Developing programs that build on that should be a high priority.
• Maximize contact with customers and potential buyers through mailings, presentations, participation in local service and business groups, and creative marketing campaigns.

Jane Baxter Lynn heads JBL Public Relations Strategies www.jblprstrategies.com, international public relations, communications and marketing consulting business, specializing in the Arts, Travel & Tourism, and Wine industries. Jane has spent more than two decades in international public relations, corporate communications and marketing.  She has worked in Belgium, France, South Africa and the United States. Her responsibilities have included management of global, national and regional communications, addressing both external and internal audiences.  Her firm provides a senior level consulting resource, focusing on branding, strategic planning and marketing communications.  Its mission is to help clients expand awareness, manage reputations, increase revenues and reduce costs through effective strategies.  The company also serves as an on-site 'bridge' during management or company structure changes, or at times of extraordinary workload for communications executives.

Copyright © 2007 Jane Baxter Lynn. All rights reserved. Re-printed by permission.

All content ©2008 FWP Acquisition Corp.,Inc.