Have you heard about this type of marketing called ‘guerrilla marketing’? In many modern references, they’re using this to refer to a form of attack marketing where you design campaigns that embarrass and drag down your competitors.
Here’s why I think it’s awful and what you should do instead in order to practice marketing ethically.
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Guerrilla marketing is for businesses that suck.
Hi I’m DJ from Rainbow Dragon Digital and I’m going to talk today about something that might be a little more controversial with marketing circles and talking about why guerrilla marketing is not something you should be doing.
What is Guerrilla Marketing?
Before I go on about guerrilla marketing let me just make sure that we’ve defined guerrilla marketing correctly. You see, I was listening to this podcast and this guy was going on about this ‘attack marketing’ guerrilla marketing.
What I understood of guerrilla marketing before this podcast was that it would mean marketing yourself in an alternative way. Doing flash mobs, appearing in places where your brand normally wouldn’t be.
And I think this is the real definition of guerrilla marketing.
But, to clarify, this video is not about the real definition of guerrilla marketing, or what I think is the real definition.
We’re Talking About “Attack Marketing” Here
In this podcast I was listening to, this guy was talking about how he was attacking competitors who were in the same space of his clients with the marketing he was creating. He was talking about how his strategies were like really bold and how the CEOs that he was working with had to have real cojones to use these strategies that he was using – marketing strategies that involved completely blasting the competition.
To me, this sat really poorly. I didn’t feel like this was an acceptable way of doing marketing.
Requiring Big Balls Probably Means Bad Business
Excuse my language, but it may take some bigger balls to be a bit of a dick, but I think that what it also indicates is that the business sucks.
If your marketing has to resort to dragging down your competition, then you probably don’t have a very good product.
Because if you had a good enough product you shouldn’t need to bring down the competition. You should be able to show up your competition without talking them down.
This is a Key Ethical Marketing Point
This is really key, I think, to practicing marketing ethically. Step two of the content marketing strategy that that I’ve kind of put together is defining your USP, right? It’s defining your Unique Selling Proposition. And there’s that that Venn diagram of the three circles and one of those circles is “what your competitors do not do well.” It’s kind of the most important circle.
It is important to focus on your competitors. To know what your competitors are doing and know what they’re doing that’s similar to you and know what you’re doing that’s dissimilar to them.
Show Yourself as Better Rather Than Drag Competitors Down
You can then focus on showing yourself to be better than your competitors without actually blasting them. You can talk yourself up. You show how you are better than them and you won’t need to resort to attacking them.
So I hope that video was a little bit enlightening on the ethics of marketing. I want to do way more videos on ethical marketing, but I’d love to know if YOU would like to see more videos on ethical marketing. Or whether you’d like to see more videos on content, on USP, choosing your target – feel free to comment and let me know what kind of videos you’d like to see more of otherwise I hope you are doing really well at the moment and I will see you in another video or in a chat.