Explore the different cases of guerrilla marketing and learn ideas to increase brand awareness and generate interest in your brand. SEO, social media campaigns, emails, advertising, comparative search engines, these are the things that often come to mind when talking about marketing. However, marketing is about finding opportunities to get in front of your customers among the many possibilities. This belief is at the heart of guerrilla marketing. Guerrilla marketing is a unique, unorthodox, and aggressive approach to making your brand visible in the physical world and getting your potential customers’ attention. In this article, you will learn about the different types of guerrilla marketing and discover unique marketing ideas to increase brand visibility and generate interest in your brand.

What is Guerrilla Marketing?

Guerrilla marketing is a promotional strategy that uses the element of surprise to generate interest in a product or service. Unlike traditional marketing campaigns, the main goal of a guerrilla marketing campaign is to surprise the audience so much that they can’t help but tell their friends. Advertising expert and author Jay Conrad Levinson coined the term “guerrilla marketing” in the 1980s. The term comes from guerrilla tactics, a strategy in which a small army can defeat a larger, better-resourced force with a surprise attack. Likewise, the idea of ​​guerrilla marketing is to create a big impact with a limited marketing budget.

Guerrilla Marketing vs. Online Marketing

At its best, guerrilla marketing can be the perfect bridge from offline to online. This allows you to generate offline exposure through foot traffic, which can be targeted to your chosen location, as well as word-of-mouth as people talk about and share your marketing on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, blogs, etc. If your idea is interesting enough, it can even generate press coverage, and if exposed to the right people at the right time and place, it can even go viral. Unlike most online marketing strategies, offline guerrilla marketing can be difficult to apply a granular “run, measure, improve” approach to. Instead, your guerrilla marketing idea will succeed or fail based on your creativity, execution, and a little luck.

Guerrilla Marketing vs. Viral Marketing

A successful guerrilla marketing strategy can attract a lot of attention and even go viral on social media. The main difference is that almost any marketing campaign has the potential to go viral, whether or not you use a guerrilla marketing strategy. Guerrilla marketing focuses on the unexpected and creativity, and aims to create a buzz naturally.

Types of guerrilla marketing

1. Outdoor
2. Indoor
3. Ambush
4. experiential marketing

There are four core types of guerrilla marketing:

1. Outdoor

Outdoor guerrilla marketing takes place outdoors, in public places. For example, you can think of unique uses of billboards, posters, trucks, murals, sculptures, and other eye-catching outdoor art installations.

Outdoor guerrilla marketing can take some very unique forms. For example, the Seattle Mariners baseball team parachuted 75 hot dogs into the stands at T-Mobile Park while Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven Is a Place on Earth" played .

2. Indoor

Just like outdoor guerrilla marketing, indoor guerrilla marketing also takes place in public places. The main difference is that indoor campaigns take place in places such as train stations, shopping malls, office buildings, airports, etc., while outdoor campaigns take place outdoors (on the streets, in stadiums, parks, plazas, etc.).

An example of indoor guerrilla marketing is the ' Turnstile Turbines ' campaign by Spanish renewable energy company Iberdrola , which replaced six subway turnstiles at the Miromesnil station in Paris with tiny wind turbines that actually generated energy (0.2 watts per person) when people walked through them.

3. Ambush

Ambush marketing is a strategy that exposes a brand or product at an event without officially sponsoring the event. It is like attending a party without permission. For example, strategically placing relevant billboards or posters near the event venue, handing out related products nearby, or organizing a flash mob.

The basic idea behind ambush marketing is to capitalize on the popularity of a major event without having to sign a big sponsorship deal. For example, Nike is not an official sponsor of the Paris 2024 Olympics or the 2024 Euros, but it has capitalized on the popularity of these two major sporting events by placing a giant ad on a building in central Paris featuring French soccer star Kylian Mbappé in the colors of the French flag: red, white and blue (Nike designed France’s 2024 Euros kit).

You can also ambush by running your own campaign in response to a competitor's campaign or a complementary business you want to partner with.

4. Experiential Marketing

Experiential marketing involves creating environments where the audience can interact. The “Turnstile Turbines” campaign mentioned above is a type of experiential marketing because subway riders actually interacted with the turnstiles. Other types of experiential guerrilla marketing tactics include brands “taking over” existing spaces (e.g., the Hello Kitty bullet train in Japan) or fully immersive installations (e.g., the Flamingo Estate gingerbread holiday pop-up in Los Angeles).

Ambient marketing is a type of experiential guerrilla marketing that builds marketing campaigns around features of existing environments. (This is why people still talk about Folgers ’ campaign that used steam from New York City manholes to make it look like a steaming cup of coffee on the street.)

Guerrilla Marketing Campaign Examples

• 'Bean Swap' by Heyday Canning Co.
• Truck Ad for Jolie Skin Co.
• Graza's 'Wanted' flyer

Guerrilla marketing can be much riskier than other marketing strategies. Because the goal is to create surprise, it is difficult to predict how customers will react. However, a successful guerrilla marketing campaign can yield great results.

Here are some examples of small businesses using guerrilla marketing to promote their brands:

'Bean Swap' by Heyday Canning Co.

Instead of doing a typical pop-up shop to promote her flavored canned beans, Heyday Canning Co. co-founder Kat Kavner decided to take a slightly different approach. “My sister came up with the idea of ​​a ‘bean swap,’ where you could bring in any beans you had at home and trade them for a can of Heyday beans,” Kat told the Shopify Masters podcast.

“We don’t have a huge marketing budget, but we wanted to use what we did have to really focus on one thing, doing something that we found really creative and fun, and that had the potential to break through the noise and drive brand awareness for Heyday,” explains Kat. “So we kept asking ourselves, ‘What can we do?’ and that’s how we eventually came back to the Bean Swap idea.”

“We had this vision very quickly of doing a bean-themed pop-up store. Everything we sold in the store was bean-related. We had Heyday bean and bean-related merchandise—bean hats, bean totes, bean socks—and we just kept coming up with more and more unique ideas.”

The “bean store” had lines around the block, sold out quickly, and, best of all, created a buzz around the brand on social media. “I think we got pretty lucky this time, honestly,” says Kat. “It’s really great to have viral TikTok success the first time around, but you won’t always. You’ll do other things, and you might completely fail, and you might feel like it wasn’t worth it. But I think it’s really important to be comfortable with taking those risks.”

Truck Ad for Jolie Skin Co.

Jolie Skin Co. makes filtered shower heads based on the idea that shower water is the root cause of most skin and hair problems. To visualize this concept, Jolie created an ad designed to look like a dirty truck.

The Jolie truck drove around New York City, delivering the message, “What if your shower water was dirtier than this truck?” The “dirty” truck attracted a lot of attention. “It’s by far the most successful form of marketing we’ve ever done in terms of how often it gets talked about or posted,” Arjan Singh, co-founder and head of brand marketing and operations for Jolie Skin Co., told Marketing Brew.

Graza's 'Wanted' flyer

Olive oil company Graza promoted the relaunch of its extra virgin olive oil potato chips using a "Wanted" flyer.

Handing out flyers isn’t a new marketing idea, but Graza’s unexpected use of the lost pet flyer format is an example of guerrilla marketing: “Extra Virgin Olive Oil Potato Chips Missing Since March 2024.” When passersby scan the QR code, they are directed to a sign-up page for Graza’s email newsletter.