Entrepreneurship, Second Edition

5.5. Guerrilla Marketing

Guerrilla marketing is marketing activities that are nontraditional, grassroots, and captivating—that gain consumers' attention and build awareness of the company. Guerrilla marketing is often linked to "creating a buzz" or generating a lot of word-of-mouth in the marketplace. The terms buzz, viral, and word-of-mouth marketing aren't interchangeable. According to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), the three concepts are defined as in the accompanying box.^[]

Entrepreneurs may use all of these nontraditional promotion campaigns to get people's attention, especially younger generations who may not pay attention to TV campaigns and print media. Guerrilla marketing is also attractive to entrepreneurs because often they have to work with a limited or nonexistent promotion budget and traditional media are very expensive. Unfortunately for entrepreneurs, such nontraditional promotional methods are getting the attention of big marketers, who want to break through the clutter of existing media. BzzAgent, a Boston-based word-of-mouth marketing agency, has more than 500,000 agents who will try clients' products and then talk about them with their friends, relatives, and acquaintances over the duration of the campaign. It has worked with companies like Anheuser-Busch, General Mills, and Volkswagen. Procter & Gamble's (P&G's) four-year-old Tremor division has a panel of 200,000 teenagers and 350,000 moms who are asked to talk with friends about new products ...