Guerrilla marketing warfare strategies
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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 :
- targeted legal attacks on the competition
- product comparison advertising
- executive raiding
- short-term alliances
- selective price cuts
- deliberate sabotage of the competitions test markets, marketing research, advertising campaigns, or sales promotions
- orchestrating negative publicity for a competitor
A guerrilla marketer must be flexible. They must be able to change tactics very quickly : this may include 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
It can involve choosing a modest market segment, geographical territory, or niche and defending it, that is, it is incorrectly used to describe a niche strategy. The term Guerrilla marketing is sometimes used to refer simply to the use of unorthodox marketing tactics.