Are you a guerilla?

Most entrepreneurs have heard of the term “Guerilla Marketing” at some or other point. The term was coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his popular 1984 book titled “Guerrilla Marketing: Secrets for Making Big Profits From Your Small Business.”

The concept is geared more towards entrepreneurs and small businesses, and does not really apply to massive corporations. It is an unconventional system of marketing and promotion which relies on time, energy and imagination – as opposed to large marketing budgets.

Young entrepreneurs generally don’t have large budgets for marketing campaigns. If they do receive funding it usually gets allocated to development or operations. Guerilla Marketing is thus very suitable to the ambitious entrepreneur.

Interestingly, I came across a post recently on Dave Duarte’s blog. It’s a post about Guerilla Kindness. According to Dave, Mike Stopforth speaks about the concept a lot, and Dave explains it in the following way:

Guerilla Kindness is an ongoing strategic approach undertaken by a company to surprise and delight people in the hope of creating a great story associated with the experience to pass on to their peers, and hopefully mention online.

As you all know I’m involved in Customer Service strategies, and I think this fits in extremely well with enhancing customer satisfaction. This is surely something I have to look at for my company, and naturally for my clients as well.

Perhaps I should quote one of Dave’s real life examples of Guerilla Kindness…

Aston Martin gave Mike the keys to a DB9 for a day after he wrote an article mentioning the vehicle. He subsequently blogged the experience, the post was picked up by some major sites and over 50 000 people read it. As a result and I’m sure quite a few of those have grown their appreciation for the company and its cars (I have).

Photo by kiwanja on Flickr.com – under a Creative Commons licence.