The origins of guerrilla marketing

J. C. Levinson (1933 - 2013)

Guerrilla marketing was initially used by smaller businesses and dates back to the early eighties of the past century. This may sound strange since we just start to notice the growing popularity of this strategy on social media, but Jay Conrad Levinson, an American marketer and business writer, invented the above mentioned terminology in 1983. One year later, he wrote one of his most popular books ever published "Guerrilla marketing". Today there are 58 volumes in over more than 60 languages and more than 21 million copies of this guerrilla bible have been sold worldwide.

Jay Conrad Levinson's vision of Guerrilla Marketing

Jay Conrad Levinson, the Father of Guerrilla Marketing describes the concept as following: 

I'm referring to the soul and essence of guerrilla marketing which remain as always achieving conventional goals, such as profits and joy, with unconventional methods, such as investing energy instead of money. Guerrilla Marketing started out a single volume and has since acted biblically by being fruitful and multiplying into a library of 35 books and counting, an Association, a lush website, an abundance of video and audio versions, an email newsletter, a consulting organization, an internationally-syndicated column for newspapers, magazines, and the Internet, and presentations in enough countries for us to consider forming our own Guerrilla United Nations. (Levinson, 2014)

According to Levinson, guerrilla marketing has become one of the fastest growing kind of marketing over all the United States of America. There are two reasons for this success: first, this particular marketing approach is so easy to apply that anybody can do it. second, it works every single time on condition that you are doing it right.

What have we learnt after 30 years of guerrilla marketing?

Although J. C. Levinson had reinvented several marketing approaches which generated a totally different vision of reaching target audience, his principles nowadays seem to be quite outdated. While Levinson did not have a proper advertising budget, he has forced to look for free and useful publicity compared to the expensive traditional advertising. Shortly after the publication of Levinson's guerrilla book, many others followed the same path. Compared with modern guerrilla marketing, we cannot speak anymore about the so called "no budget marketing" approach of Levinson. I acknowledge that actual guerrilla actions are still less expensive than traditional campaigns, but they go way further than the initial principles. These days, guerrilla marketing has become part of a broader concept which calls brand activation. Especially when social media is involved, this strategy gets another dimension. 

The term, guerrilla marketing, is now often used more loosely as a descriptor for the use of non-traditional media, such as or street art, graffiti (or "reverse graffiti"), flyer-posting, ambush marketing, and forehead advertising. It may also be a strong component of promotions involving associated strategies, such as: Grassroots marketing, street marketing, internet marketing (buzz), viral marketing and even undercover or stealth marketing.