Hello, creatives!

We’re gonna jump right in and talk about guerrilla marketing, what it is, and how to use it for your brand.

What is Guerrilla Marketing?

Out of all the marketing strategies and tactics available to the average brand, this one takes the cake as the most creative route. To understand guerrilla marketing you have to understand the purpose of guerrilla warfare. Using the element of surprise and targeting places where you're most likely to catch the attention of your audience, guerrilla marketing leverages word-of-mouth and short-lived events to build hype for brand and product awareness.

Guerrilla marketing can look like a lot of things and that’s what can make it a fun, memorable, and effective tactic for marketing campaigns. To be clear, guerrilla marketing needs to be nestled within a broader strategic plan for any brand to see both short-term and long-term success from it. It absolutely cannot be a replacement for poor branding overall.

Let’s jump to some examples.

3 Examples of Guerrilla Marketing

To showcase how effective guerrilla marketing can be achieved on a variety of budget levels and brand types, I’m breaking down three of my favorite case studies in recent years. So let’s talk about it. Some of my favorite examples include:

• IHOP “Changes” Its’ Name to IHOB

• The Fearless Girl Statue Raises Awareness of Inequity on Wall Street

• Waterparks Creates the Ultimate Guerilla Fandom Album Release

IHOP “Changes” Its’ Name to IHOB

The breakfast food chain, International House of Pancakes, set the internet on fire with a sneaky tweet introducing they were changing the “p” to a “b” in their name. This left news outlets, vloggers and everyday people taking to social media platforms to voice their comments, complaints and conspiracy theories on the move. IHOP then also launched a series of commercials to announce the International House of Pancakes was now International House of Burgers.

IHOP used multiple types of guerrilla marketing tactics with this campaign, from social media to commercials. After it was announced the “pancakes” in their acronym was being changed to “burgers”, they went so far with the guerrilla marketing effort as to change the signs in major cities to reflect their new moniker.

Here are two sample videos showcasing the types of messaging they used and the President of IHOP discussing the results of the campaign. And boy were there results. More than 1 Billion social media impressions, hundreds of hours of news outlets discussing the topic of IHOP introducing burgers to their menu, thousands of Youtubers and everyday people going to IHOP to test out the menu and tell the whole world about it. By all counts, this campaign was a success at getting the word out about their new menu upgrades.

And in the end, the name change was just a wild, fun gimmick that took everyone for a ride. Oh, but the way, the campaign lasted about a week. A WEEK.

The Fearless Girl Statue Raises Awareness of Inequity on Wall Street

The Fearless Girl Statue took the world by storm when it was placed in front of the Bull on Wall Street the night before International Women’s Day in 2017. Since then, it’s won a Shorty Award in multiple categories for raising awareness of female leadership in the business sector. The agency involved with the Fearless Girl Statue created her to raise awareness of the SHE ETF fund, made available for trading on Wall Street with a focus on investing in businesses who had female leaders. And to prove a point that female leadership isn’t just a fad, but an economic advantage.

The results were astounding. These are just the highlights that caused it to win so many awards:

• Over 1 billion Twitter impressions within the first 12 hours; 3.3 billion Twitter impressions in 5 weeks; 405 million Instagram impressions in 6 weeks.

• SSGA's SHE Fund saw a 384% increase in its average daily trading volume in the week following the Fearless Girl launch.

• SSGA's share of voice jumped 379% (3/7 - 3/31; source: Radian6).

• 6 days after Fearless Girl appeared, BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, followed SSGA's initiative, announcing their commitment to advocating for more women on corporate boards.

• Fearless Girl reached 128 countries, with the majority of conversation in financial, leadership, innovation and social justice communities.

• Online petitions demanding Fearless Girl remain in place garnered over 40,000 signatures, leading NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio to admit her as city public art, letting her stay through at least 2018.

• Fearless Girl inspired Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney to re-introduce her Gender Diversity in Corporate Leadership Act.

The statue became so popular that is was allowed to stay. And this piece of cultural importance is still relevant today. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away, a lace collar was placed on her in RBG’s honor. This shows that some guerrilla marketing efforts aren’t just to make a profit, but to make a cultural statement that can be just as relevant years down the line.

Waterparks Creates the Ultimate Guerrilla Marketing Campaign for Their Fandom Album Release

So, the first two examples were a large corporation and a social enterprise with money to spend. This last example is a boy band named Waterparks (Parx for short) that was originally from Texas who have made their way into the top pop punk charts on multiple streaming platforms and recently announced a tour in Europe next year. While I was only just introduced to “God’s favorite f***ing boy band” earlier this year by a friend whose been following them for a while, as a marketing professional I have to include them in this post because, in my opinion, they have mastered the art of guerrilla marketing.

When they released their album Fandom last year, which is a concept album that touches on several themes –most notably how fans can be wildly obsessive and down-right suffocating at times– there were a number of tactics they used to build hype among their fandom that created a successful launch. To be clear, these tactics weren’t just deployed with Fandom, they use these fairly regularly, which creates a giant, ever-evolving series of inside jokes and intimate moments between the band and their fans. The three guys who make up the band are Awsten Knight as lead vocals, Geoff Wigington as lead guitarist and Otto Wood as the drummer.

Let’s break down the tactics.

The hair-as. Each album they’ve created has had its own carefully crafted color scheme that means the band has entered into a new era in their genre-bending music, which have been announced while the songs are still being written and produced via the lead singer’s hair color, appropriately named Hair-as. For Fandom, Awsten Knight changed his hair a bright green.

The lead singer uses emojis and a new twitter account as clues to future albums. For example, the lead singer, Awsten Knight, changed his Twitter handle to “Danny Fandom” with an orange and a duck emoji for the release of Fandom.

The album names are alphabetical. Starting with Airplane Conversations back in 2012, the band’s album after Fandom will start with a G. This creates buzz within the fandom to discuss their own guesses on what the next album names will be.

Hidden within each album are Easter eggs to past, present, and future albums. This means that to get the full experience of their music, you can’t just listen to one song or one album. All of it tells a story of where they’ve been, where they are and where they’re going.

They hide visual Easter eggs and just fun jokes in their marketing collateral prior to albums releases. For example, here are some screenshots of fake song titles for Fandom hidden in the source code of their website as well as a single frame of a duck (a clue that was given in Awsten’s Twitter handle) with the words “you found the duck” was placed in the music video of Watch What Happens Next. Also, in the “Watch What Happens Next” music video, you can see a mic replaced with an orange, again hinting at not only the Twitter handle, but also the color scheme for the album, which is orange and green.

A new instagram account was created for Fandom and livestream on social became a weekly event. As the drop date drew closer, a new instagram account was created with limited time access before it became private. This account’s sole purpose is for the lead singer, Awsten Knight, to leak sneak peeks of the release every Saturday at 7pm.

With all of this said, Waterparks does a fantastic job about making their brand an intense and interactive experience. Utilizing a number of guerrilla marketing tactics for every stage of their band has created an expectation of surprise with bread crumbs along the way to keep everyone interested. Genius, really. And very on-point for a genre-bending band like them.

How Guerrilla Marketing Can Be Used For Your Brand

The key thing found in all effective guerrilla marketing is that it creates an urgent need to experience a short-lived event. Whether it’s to learn about hotly anticipated brand news, or to see a pop-up art exhibit, or to get exclusive access to behind-the-scenes content, creating an experience that’s worth engaging in is vital. What’s more, is that the guerrilla marketing must tie into a broader scope of brand messaging or brand identity that the target audience wants to be a part of.

So how can you apply this to your brand?

First things first, you have to have an intimate understanding of your brand’s identity. And I say brand rather than organization, because an organization is a collection of people while the brand is the personality of the organization that is manifested through carefully crafted marketing communications efforts. Without knowing the who, what and why of your brand, any action plan will fall flat.

Second, understand where your target audience lives both physically and digitally. This will determine the means to communicate them and the tools available to help you. If your target audience are heavy TikTok users then by all means jump on that and create fun content that’ll appeal to your audience. If you live in an area where Facebook is the king of social platforms, then work on building a strategy for Facebook live events and engaging with your audience there. It’s perfectly okay to start small and grow bigger later. Sustainability is key.

Third, figure out what fun, interactive events would work best to meet a physical, social, or creative need for your audience. For IHOP, they expanded their target audience to include those who go out for burgers regularly, which meant finding a way to cut through the noise of other burger brands. The Fearless Girl Statute met the social need to encourage female business leaders and aspiring future female leaders. As for Waterparks, a lot of what they do meets a creative need for a wide swath of people who can relate to the lyrics, the personalities of the band, and the struggles of creative professions.

Lastly, guerrilla marketing gets its namesake from warfare tactics that surprise the enemy in their home turf. So don’t be afraid to get your rivals’ attention. Arguably, this is imperative if you have a service-, product- or social justice-focused brand. With other fast food chains having large Twitter followings, IHOP announced it on Twitter first, expecting to get roasted by Wendy’s and other fast food chains because they were entrenching on their territory. The Fearless Girl Statute was placed on the front porch one of the most male-dominated industries in the US. A lot of Waterparks’ lyrics, especially in Fandom, are digs at culture of the music industry and the pitfalls that can swallow musicians whole.

This was a longer post than normal, but I hope it was helpful. The next blog post will cover royalties in the music industry and the digital disruption that has changed the game.

Until Next Time,

Rochele

P.S. If you are a creative or high end brand in need of some guidance on how to get to the next level in your business goals, feel free to fill out this form and I’ll be in touch to book a discovery call for a brand coaching session or my strategic planning consulting service.