Guerrilla Marketing : Reaching the customer in an untraditional way

Introduction: One is under continuous influence of commercials and advertisements each day, it has reached to such a level that the end customer are blocking today’s channels. Therefore the authors of this thesis argue that mainstream marketing approaches are getting old, TV commercials and traditional advertisements are not as effective as it has been. For instance, in 1965 one could reach 80% of a mainstream target audience with three advertisements spots. Accordingly, in 2002, one needed 127 spots to reach the same percentage. Organizations need new ways to reach through the clutter in the market. Therefore, guerrilla marketing is interesting. The purpose of this thesis is to examine guerrilla marketing. Methodology: The authors wanted to examine the phenomenon of guerrilla marketing and therefore decided to use a qualitative approach to construct a deep and profound picture. In order to fulfill the purpose, the authors of this thesis conducted 7 interviews with profound respondents from both Sweden and the USA. Results: According to the empirical findings guerrilla marketing is a faster and more innovating way of marketing, which meets the end customer with new creative ways. Comparing to traditional marketing, guerrilla marketing creates attention with a smaller budget and can often result in free publicity in other media. Further the overall opinion of guerrilla marketing is positive, since a lot of the feedbacks for the different campaigns have been positive, although in some organizations guerrilla marketing could meet some criticism and conservatism. The connection between our empirical findings and the frame of reference is a fact; guerrilla marketing is very much about communicating a message using several senses to make sure that if will stay with the end customers. Although, initially smaller companies used guerrilla marketing but today it is clear that companies of all sizes can use it, it is more depending on the position in the market. To conclude, when the authors started the work on this thesis they were in the consensus that guerrilla marketing was a method or an approach, although today it is clear. Guerrilla marketing is more than that; it is a state of mind, openness to innovation and creativity within marketing. One can use it as a compliment to other traditional campaigns, in order to create word of mouth or publicity in other media