In marketing and strategic management, marketing warfare strategies are a type of marketing strategy that uses military metaphor to craft a businesses strategy. See marketing warfare strategies for background and an
overview. Guerrilla marketing warfare strategies are a type of marketing warfare strategy designed to wear-down the enemy
by a long series of minor attacks. Rather than engage in major battles, a guerrilla force is divided into small groups that
selectively attacks the target at its weak points. To be effective, guerrilla teams must be able to hide between strikes. They
can disappear into the remote countryside, or blend into the general population. The general form of the strategy is a sequence
of attacking, retreating, and hiding, repeated multiple times in series. It has been said that “Guerrilla forces never win
wars, but their adversaries often lose them”.
Strengths
The main strengths of guerrilla strategies are :
- Because you never attack the enemy’s main force, you preserve your resources.
- It is very flexible and can be adapted to any situation, offensive or defensive.
- It is very difficult to counter with conventional methods.
Guerrilla marketing warfare involves
In the business arena, this involves :
- 1) targeted legal attacks on the competition
- 2) product comparison advertising
- 3) executive raiding
- 4) short-term alliances
- 5) selective price cuts
- 6) deliberate sabotage of the competitions test markets, marketing research, advertising campaigns, or sales promotions
- 7) orchestrating negative publicity for a competitor
It can also involve choosing a modest market segment, geographical territory, or niche and defending it.
No matter how successful the guerrilla becomes, he/she should never act like a market leader. A guerrilla marketer must be
flexible. They must be able to change tactics very quickly : this includes abandoning a market segment, product,
product line, brand, business model, or objective. Guerrillas are not ashamed to make a strategic withdrawal.
The strategy is suitable when:
- the target competitor has relatively strong resources and is well able to withstand a head-on attack
- the attacker has moderately weak resources
The term Guerrilla marketing is sometimes used to refer
simply to the use of unorthodox marketing tactics.
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