With many businesses finding themselves forced to cut costs, the smarter ones are turning to new and innovative ways of getting their message out their. Guerilla Marketing is a low cost high impact form of marketing which regretfully Ireland has never truely taken on board, but i can see in the current times it becoming more prevalient.
Found on Trend Hunter, here are my two favourite Guerilla Marketing camapigns:
Best Ever Anti Smoking AD
Raising Awareness
At the moment i’m working on a killer Guerilla marketing campaign, hopefully as effective as the above ones but for a large commercial entity. Actually to be honest, were building the campaign and later we’ll choose the client, i have a few in mind. The more i get into the mind set of a Guerilla the more i begin to think – is traditional marketing dead?
Saw this video on Karina’s 121BizNet blog. Harvard business offer free insights on their blogs and TV networks that allow dedicated business people to keep up to date with the latest trends in markets – which i’ve always found to be amazing help when your stuck on certain topics. You don’t need a degree anymore to understand and take advantage of best market practice. In fact it could be argued that in a recession people with degrees stand, on occasion, a slight dis-advantage as high paid jobs become scarce and companies fear employing someone with high qualifications at a lower wage will lead to them leaving as soon as the economy starts to recover. I personally know a few people who are omitting their masters qualifications on their CV to help seek employment, but i digress, watch the Vid if you have a spare few mins.
It got me thinking about how people who are not massively income effective are buying into the recession simply due to consumer sentiment and in turn how to refocus strategic marketing to facilitate the mindset of the consumer, hence growing your market over all and thus market share, even in the bad times.
One questions wanna be entrepreneurs always ask is “how do i identify the perfect product” to start a business around.
If you’ve decided to make the leap and start a business, but have yet to decide on the “perfect” idea, your about to find out there is no “perfect” idea’s just good ones – all of which need a lot of work to make them great.
But for those of you who are looking for idea’s here’s a few questions to get you started:
1. Can you solve a problem or even lessen the impact a problem causes? 2. What do you find really annoying, could you find a way to make it less annoying? 3. Is there a way you can save people time, effort or energy? 4. What are people doing successfully and making money from – and how can i improve it? I love this one, if your completely stuck for idea’s go travel to some wierd and wonderful places – i guarantee if you have your eyes open idea’s will fall into your lap. If you’ve never been outside Europe / America, get yourself a plane ticket – in the Medieval times travel was considered an education unto itself.
Another important part about finding the “perfect product” is that it has to be something you can get passionate about, without passion you’ll fall at the first hurdle. Just because its a good idea, doesnt mean its a good idea for you to take and run with.
Remeber the questions you ask yourself will steer the answers that you think up. Anything can be achieved if you put your mind to it and work hard enough. So when asking questions a key point is to state them in the positive! This is a key way to program your mind for success, if you ask yourself why can’t you do something it is programed to tell you why you can’t. If you ask yourself how can you it is programed to give you idea’s about how you can.
Often when i bounce idea’s off friends they say stupid things like – “sounds good but if it was such a great idea surely someone would have done this before!” (Although in the last few years people that know the businesses i own know better than to throw this one out). If you suffer from this see the below video, which i saw today and found totally inspiring.
