Jaw-Dropping Guerrilla Marketing Lessons and Examples

Have you tried employing guerrilla marketing techniques? In today’s socially engaged and networked marketplace, guerrilla word-of-mouth marketing has moved to the top of marketing campaign elements at your disposal. Here we will discuss guerrilla marketing examples and lessons.

You just can’t say it. You have to get people to say it to each other.

–    James Farley

Guerrilla marketing campaigns are one of the best ways to get potential customers to talk about you.

Guerrilla marketing takes consumers by surprise, makes an indelible impression, and pops up where and when people least expect it. It often has a large targeted audience and often can be accomplished at a reduced cost.

By being a little more clever and unpredictable, you challenge consumers who appreciate a little fun in their products.

Guerrilla marketing was made for small business owners. It requires creativity, flexibility, and a willingness to take a little risk. We use Guerrilla programs usually when a client says to us, we don’t have much budget but we’d really like to get some media attention.

They can be an awesome way to get you noticed, set you apart from your competition, and earn you a reputation for being fun and different–all tailored to whatever budget you desire.

A small business should ask themselves, what’s their essence–what’s the core message that can be distilled into a 5-second exchange or in a clever installation?

In defining guerrilla or viral marketing, many creative descriptions have been put forward.

At its core, this form of marketing is simply the “spread of an idea” that helps market your business or cause. It’s putting material out there that by its very nature attracts attention and is talked about.

The best method to look at the practice of guerrilla marketing is to examine the research of some highly intelligent folks who have dedicated years to deciphering the elements of its content.

The best we could find was from an associate professor at the Wharton School of Business, Jonah Berger, who studied some classic viral marketing examples to see what lessons can be had from those example campaigns.

His first article to attract attention was his now famous joint paper with Katherine Milkman called What Makes Online Content Go Viral?, where Milkman and Berger found that  online content often went viral when:

It was positive, dwelling on positive issues or topics.

It evoked a strong emotional reaction (joy, fear, anger).

It was practically useful.

Later, Berger would take a more in-depth look at this type of marketing in his book Contagious: Why Things Catch On. Here he outlines the more comprehensive STEPPS system which serves to examine common elements in viral pieces of content:

Social currency

People enjoy sharing things that compliment them, either by making them look “in the know” or by showcasing their good taste or opinion on something. As an example, I’ve regularly found that customer service stories are the most viral type of customer service content because sharing a list of great stories makes you a thought leader.

Triggers

Reading Berger’s book, you’ll be surprised to hear about how often very common brands are talked about (people talk about Cheerios more than Disney World? Who would’ve thought?).

That’s because some topics/brands/products have more common triggers. Many viral pieces of content rely on this; remember how popular the Budweiser “Waaassssuuuuuuup?!” commercials were? That’s because they could be used as a greeting, a very common trigger.

Emotional reaction

“When we care, we share,” or in other words, as Berger’s findings from his earlier paper show, people tend to share content that evokes a strong emotional reaction. Surprisingly (as depressing as the news often seems), the most viral pieces of online content didn’t focus on low-energy emotions like “sadness,” as marketer Carson Ward points out here:

These findings are (almost) exactly mirrored by more recent research published in the Harvard Business Review, which echoes the fact that high-energy emotions are what truly stir discussion.

Public usage

In essence, social proof. People need to see others doing something in order to easily embrace it. As psychologist Robert Cialdini revealed in their book Influence, sometimes people “fake it before they make it” to achieve this, such as mega-churches putting in money before they pass the donation plate around (people see the bills placed in and base their own donation on what is there).

Practical Value

Great news for content marketers, practically useful material was shown to be highly viral. People like sharing “news you can use” because they want to help others and look good for doing so.

Stories

As I’ve mentioned before, in the world of marketing, stories lead to persuasion, because it’s so easy for us to get wrapped up in a good tale. If you’ll recall the viral attention that the Red Paperclip story received, it was all because people simply had to know what happened next in the tale. 

The “why” of a viral success story is not so easily explained through this sort of examination, however.

Another great way to learn about the practice of viral marketing is to look closely at successful campaigns that have been run in the past. Below, I’ll show you some of my favorite examples of guerrilla marketing.

Viral Marketing Examples

The general public most often associates a “viral” piece of content with a hilarious YouTube video, such as Gangnam Style. While videos certainly are a big subset of viral content, many more mediums and methods apply.

WePay

One of my favorite examples of a company going “guerilla” and creating a story worth talking about is WePay and their stunt of leaving a 600-pound block of ice in front of a PayPal conference.

WePay’s execution here was brilliant: for years, people had been complaining about how PayPal would “freeze” their accounts, locking them out from withdrawing the money they earned. If you sell goods online, your PayPal account could be a big part of your livelihood, so to be locked out and ignored was obviously enraging for many people.

No surprise, then, that WePay’s jab at PayPal’s willingness to freeze your money was so well received! Press around the story was whirling, starting with coverage on TechCrunch:

Since some of the biggest points of difference that WePay offered were dependability, security, and customer service that PayPal has often been accused of lacking, taking a jab at their competitor with this stunt wasn’t just for the random, pointless press; it got people talking about a problem WePay truly hoped to address.

Blendtec will it blend?

How the heck do you promote a line of blenders? That’s the question Blendtec found itself asking when it wanted to promote its new line of blenders. It’s tough for a blender to have “social currency,” so what could they do? 

Funny. Memorable. Manly.  The keys to success from the ‘Will It Blend’ marketing campaign. It is certainly something you’ll want to do for a networked market. Like Blendtec did very successfully.

‘Will It Blend’  is a marketing campaign consisting of a series of infomercials demonstrating the Blendtec line of blenders. In the show, Tom Dickson, the Blendtec founder, attempts to blend various unusual items in order to show off the toughness and power of his blender.

As a little background, George Wright, Blendtec’s vice president of marketing and sales created a YouTube and marketing campaign called “Will it Blend”? He happened to witness CEO, Tom Dickson feeding a 2×2 inch wooden board into a commercial blender as part of his destructive test and found it fascinating, hence thought others might get a kick out of watching the process, and the idea for creating a video was born.

The brilliant answer was found in the series called Will It Blend?, a video collection of Blendtec blenders destroying (or not destroying) popular items that definitely should not be in a blender. 

The genius of this series was not only in how it made blenders a discussion topic (seriously, kudos), but in how the videos showcased just how rugged Blendtec blenders really were.

The showmanship may have been great, but these videos were also moving products. If a blender can spit up and chew out an airsoft pistol, it can most certainly handle any fruits and vegetables that you’ll throw at it.

Dove

The Dove Evolution viral ad is effective because it sends a unique, positive message about the true definition of beauty. And this video really did spread like a virus. Not only did it get nearly 2 million hits within a month’s time, but it also received attention from top TV shows Ellen, The View, and Entertainment Tonight.

Kmart

With revenue continuing its long, steady decline, Kmart teamed with ad agency FCB to reenergize its much-maligned brand, promoting its product-delivery program by appealing to the giggly personality in all of us.

The “Ship My Pants” online video embraces sophomoric wordplay to inform customers that items that are out of stock in Kmart stores may now be shipped directly to their homes for free.

“I just shipped my pants, and it’s very convenient!” enthuses one elderly shopper; another proclaims, “I just shipped my bed!”

While some viewers called it “gross” and “vulgar,” the spot racked up some 20 million YouTube views by the end of last year, at one point yielding one share for every nine views–proof positive that schoolyard humor never goes out of style.

FCB followed “Ship My Pants” with the equally ‘punny’ “Big Gas Savings” spot, as well as commercials that revived “Yo Mama” jokes and featured a branded Kmart rap.

The tongue-in-cheek approach convinced Kmart to retain FCB as its agency of record but wasn’t enough to boost the retail chain’s flagging fortunes: Despite the widely viewed campaigns, revenue sagged 3.7 percent in 2013.

 “You just can’t say it. You have to get people to say it to each other”

–         James Farley, CMO Ford

When was the last time you employed word-of-mouth marketing messaging?