Is Guerrilla Marketing a Good Fit for Your Business?

For the second installment of our August series on advertising, we’ve decided to focus on guerrilla marketing. Guerrilla marketing is an alternative method of advertising that uses unconventionality and creativity to surprise and grab the attention of its target audience. Click here for some great guerrilla marketing examples.

From posting flyers to the installation of urban art, this edgy and exciting advertising method certainly holds a number of benefits for a company interested in taking that route. However, the edginess inherent in guerrilla marketing can bring with it some negative aspects that might not make it the best fit for some companies. In order to help you decide whether it is right for your company, we’ve compiled some advantages and disadvantages of using guerrilla marketing.

Advantages

Lower price tag. Guerrilla marketing can be especially attractive to small businesses because it involves a grassroots approach to advertising that is usually less expensive than traditional advertising. An example of such a tactic might be the creation of a flyer, sticker or stencil.

The opportunity to attract attention. The main advantage guerrilla marketing has going is its ability to create brand awareness. Generally speaking, audiences tend to be able to tune out the same old advertising tactics of television and radio ads simply because they are constantly inundated with them. Guerrilla marketing’s unconventional antics serve to separate a product, service, company or brand from the same old static.

Disadvantages

Word of mouth can be slow to develop. In order for a guerrilla marketing campaign to be effective, it has to go beyond the initial attention-grabbing phase and generate word of mouth for the brand. Unfortunately, many campaigns fizzle out and fail to pick up momentum. This would render all the time and effort that went into carrying out a guerrilla marketing campaign useless.

Unintended reactions. The biggest disadvantage of guerrilla marketing is its ever-present potential to backfire. Guerrilla marketing’s unconventional nature makes it susceptible to potentially damaging consequences. These can include anything from criticism from an annoyed public to the legal repercussions that can result from failing to get proper permission. All of these reactions could result in bad publicity that could snowball very quickly and do serious harm to a brand’s reputation.

Ultimately, deciding to add guerrilla marketing to the ever-growing collection of advertising methods at your disposal should depend on whether your target market would react favorably to such an approach.

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