GUERRILLA MARKETING

All my life I’ve been dreaming about becoming a young entrepreneur, to run my own business and take strategic decisions to make my company as much profitable as possible. I know that running my own small business, means having limited budgets to decide what to do in every single moment, so I’m always looking for information about how to be successful running your own small business. For example, one of my worries is how can you market your products successfully without spending a large amount of money.

A few years ago, I read an article written by Jay Conrad Levinson that showed what’s called GUERRILLA MARKETING: easy and inexpensive strategies for making big profits from your small business. The article was called GUERRILLAS IN THE REAL WORLD (you can find it here: http://www.gmarketing.com/articles/read/3/Guerrillas_in_the_Real_World.html ).

After reading this article, I decided to start reading more articles about Guerrilla Marketing, and finally I bought Jay Conrad Levinson’s book called Guerrilla Marketing to study in depth how it works and what to do to be a good marketer in a Guerrilla Marketing point of view.

Nowadays, I’m not running my own business but I hope I’ll be able to do it in a few years, so I want to develop my topic on how to market products using GUERRILLA MARKETING STRATEGIES.

My main goal with this topic is to develop all my ideas about how to appeal people by using alternative marketing tools. New generations are immunized against TV, radio or newspaper marketing campaigns, so we need to take different roads, use different tools and convince these generations by using other techniques. To inform our segments about what we’re doing we have to use different tools totally focused on showing how the product works, attracting their attention by becoming eye-catching. Moreover, it isn’t worth to spend hundreds of millions developing huge marketing campaigns because what we want is to appeal our specific target, show them our skills and capabilities, and of course hear from them to customize our products/services as much as we can to maximize profits by minimizing marketing expenses.

What’s interesting for me is how a small business can be more successful than a big company by using Guerrilla Marketing as its main marketing tool. I also have a few questions about this marketing tool. Is it efficient and effective? Should we use latest technologies to be successful? Are small businesses able to afford these latest technologies? Do we have any example? How can we create a good guerrilla marketing campaign? What should we know about our customers to implement these kinds of strategies? Etc.

We can relate this topic to Customer Insights because it’s clear that we need to know perfectly what kind of people are buying our product, what they expect and what their insights are. I’ll try to develop all my questions by using different sources of information and adding real case studies to clarify as much as possible how can you succeed.

Prosumers: 21st century Consumers

One year ago I heard for the first time the word: Prosumer. The word prosumer is an acronym composed by the genuine fusion of PRODUCER and CONSUMER.

In 1972, Mashall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt suggested, in their book Take Today, that having new technologies people could be producer and consumer at the same time. In the same way, Alvin Toffler in 1980 coined the word prosumer, when he foresaw high saturated markets of standardized products, believing that companies could start a “mass customization” age getting customers involved in the design and production process.

However, currently mass customization is not as usual as Alvin forecasted. Most of consumption habits are passive, because consumers are not interested in making efforts to customize the large quantity of products and services they usually buy. As Barry Schwartz pointed out in The Paradox of Choice: Why More or Less, people experiment decreasing performance when buying, as a result of confusion generated by having excessive options that cause dissatisfaction and stress. By the way, a new segment is appearing: Amateurs highly committed; people that can consume products but at the same time build and share specific contents, information, channels and other networks to criticize or praise companies, products or services.

As we discussed in class, there is a correlation between our emotional state and what Barry Schwartz calls “tyranny of choice”. From unmet expectations to regret because of choosing the wrong way, that’s the peril of living in a multiple-choice society. Every time we have to buy a product there is a wide variety and assortment of products that difficult our choice causing stress.

Prosumers are assuming a role in this society that will become a key success factor for companies. A prosumer is a person connected to a large number of companies and with the capacity to publish opinions about them. Anciently a company could sell horrible products or deliver bad services, but nothing special happened. Nowadays, consumers have speakers everywhere, everything is happening simultaneously and this is extremely dangerous for companies that are not performing perfectly.

What is more interesting about this fact is that when a consumer has a wide range of products to choose from he/she usually enters the Internet and looks for information in communities, websites, blogs, etc. Indeed, a satisfied or dissatisfied consumer is able to spread all his/her knowledge about a product or service, allowing other consumers to reduce uncertainty during the consumer decision making. It means consumers are currently favoring or damaging brands image.

Related to what Barry Schwartz pointed out during his podcast, reducing uncertainty allows people to be more satisfied when buying a product, and also reduces stress. The consumer behavior will change into a more standardized process when buying low involvement products and into an easier process (because of having more information) when buying High involvement products. I would like to stress that having a large amount of information flowing on the Internet would force companies to provide excellent services and products to avoid criticism.

The society of Information will allow us to become more experts in consumer decision making processes, avoiding high levels of dissatisfaction as we currently experience. The report about happiness in America determined that Americans are also unhappier than ever before might simply be a perverse coincidence. We may even question the statistics: As the social stigma associated with depression decreases, people may be more open about their listlessness. They may even feel encouraged to consider themselves depressed as the subject receives so much attention in the media.

Every single person should try to write down, discuss and share its experiences, because collaboration creates communities allowing people to increase product knowledge and performance, and furthermore to adjust almost perfectly expectations and reality.

Finally, I would like to recommend this video that shows how media will impact in our society, changing habits, behavior and ways of thinking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xj8ZadKgdC0

The paradox of choice

Do you feel free? Do you think you can do everything you want whenever you want? Is freedom present in our lifes? Do you feel under stress when you are purchasing products or services? Of course we are free to do whatever we want, and as time goes by we are freer than we were because our current society is trying to break ancient behavioral rules and opening our frame of action, to let us act without restrictions.

How do people choice between different options? Which process do we follow before purchasing a product or service? People normally follow a standard when purchasing products or services. We all start by perceiving a need (recognizing a problem) we must satisfy. Once we have indentified this need, we start a research process seeking for value (we search for information whether internal or external to try to find out which products/services can satisfy our needs). At this point, the biggest problem arises. A person has a wide range of products or services and has to evaluate them and select which one is the best to buy. Here is where dissatisfaction appears, just after paying the product. In spite of having the product you desired, you had a lot of options (meaning also high expectations), so you’re not happy about the choice you took because it always could be better. As Barry Schwartz mentioned during his speech if there’s only one option, it world’s fault but if I have multiple options, then it’s my fault.

Barry Schwartz is trying to link multiple choice purchasing situations with what we call post purchasing dissatisfaction. The more options we have, the more likely we are to be dissatisfied, because there’s always a cost of opportunity when we decide to buy one product instead of another.

As far as I’m concerned, having the chance to buy everything you want with multiple options causes a feeling of guilty and regret due to cost of opportunity. Indeed, a consumer decision process is not as freer as it used to be. There are always some variables that are forcing the customer to take a quick decision. The first variable is TIME. People normally go to buy with their family, children or friends. When you are buying a product that implies a lot of money, usually you should need a minimum amount of time to take your decision, but time pressures and causes dissatisfaction because of being hasty.

What’s more, there’s always a salesmen assessing during your process that could disturb or slant your opinion. Normally, salesmen increase expectations about a product because they are trying to sell as much as they can, so the more they increase your expectations the more will be the gap between these expectations and the real performance (causing more dissatisfaction).

Human people is not only frustrated because of choosing one product from a wide range, is frustrated because we tend to create excessive expectations about products or services. A human need it’s not always satisfied 100%, so the gap between this 100% need and the product performance is what we call dissatisfaction.

One year ago I had a personal experience about the paradox of choice. I thought it was so frustrating but now I am happy that I was lucky about the choice I took. One year ago, I had to select which university to go as an exchange student. The process is so easy: we have a list of 100 universities and you should choose all the universities you want. Then you are selected depending on your grades. My first choice was Los Angeles (USC) and my second option was Austin (UT). It was so frustrating because I wanted LA and I did all my consumer decision process as perfectly as I could, but it was denied.

The positive side of this process was that my expectations about going to Austin were lower than the expectations I would have if going to LA. So, comparing my first expectations to now, I’m totally satisfied. I like Austin more than LA, because of UT, but also due to my friends and the city. Sometimes, happiness doesn’t depend only in your expectations; it also depends on the use of the product and the grade of implication. I have some friends studying there and they are unsatisfied because of the high expectations they created. To sum up, I would like to stress that any consumer decision process is not as easy as it would seem before starting the process. However, what is totally wrong is creating low expectations and removing most of the options to ensure happiness, because the pursuit of happiness is based on different aspects. In my opinion, we should have a positive vision of what we are doing, we know that the rules are imposed and that our world is full options thanks to information and globalization. The most logical option is understand this complex world and try to coexist by adjusting our expectations to real satisfaction.