Creative Marketing for Guerrillas

Chapter 5 of Guerrilla Marketing covers creativity in marketing.  Levinson explains that in marketing, creativity is directly tied to generating profits.  A campaign is only creative if it's successful.  If your ad or campaign is generating large profits, you can conclude that it inherently contains creativity and vice versa.    

 

 

 

First, Levinson lays out a guide for determining your creative strategy.  Begin by writing a three sentence strategy.  Make sure that the strategy includes the purpose of your message, the benefits of your product/service, and the personality of your brand.  Once you've written your creative marketing program, Levinson recommends that you practice by writing creative strategies for current advertisers.  He suggests that it is beneficial to choose at least one from each form of media including newspaper ad, TV ad, website ad, and direct-mail ad.  From this practice, you can gain some experience, apply it to your own campaign, and have a better understanding of your competitors which will help you to avoid a similar or imitating version of their ads.

Once you've developed your strategy, Levinson gives you a seven step program to assure you're on track for success with your campaign.

 

 

1.  Find the inherent drama within your offering.

Everyone loves a little drama.  Your product/service needs to have some aspect of interest so you can grab people's attention, otherwise you may not sell anything.

2.  Translate that inherent drama into a meaningful benefit.

People buy benefits, not features.  Make sure your audience can see that they're not simply buying your product, they're buying an outcome, an image, a status, etc.  Make sure you tie this back to your dramatic feature.

3.  State your benefits in as believable a way as possible.

Discover the relationship between and the difference in honesty and believability.  Be honest but make sure that you can convey a message that is believable to your audience.  Marketing/advertising has the reputation for being deceitful or exaggerative so be thoughtful in your messaging and make your statements easily believable. 

4.  Get people's attention.

People don't care about advertising.  They care about what is interesting to them.  Don't be guilty of creating advertising that's more interesting than your actual product/service.  Get it right by making sure that what you sell is interesting in its own way. 

5.  Motivate your audience to get involved.

Engaging your audience's involvement will help you be successful.  Use tactics to encourage their participation through visiting your store, calling you, keeping a coupon, subscribing to receive more information, visit your website, or take advantage of a free demonstration/trial.  Give them a reason to be actively engaged in your product so they will be inherently more invested in it. 

6.  Be sure you are communicating clearly.

Realize that at best, you're only going to capture about half of people's attention when you present your ad.  The main point must be clearly articulated, communicated, and understood.  Zero ambiguity in your message is the goal; make sure it is clearly understood by all. 

7.  Measure your finished advertisement, commercial, letter, website, and/or brochure against your creative strategy.

Use the strategy as your guide.  If your campaign isn't successful, start over and create it using the outlined process above.  If you find that the ad is consistent with your strategy and it's still unsuccessful, carefully evaluate the other aspects of your product, image, message, etc. to discover where the shortcomings are.

In marketing, being creative isn't the same as we stereotypically think.  It doesn't mean you're necessarily artistic, an excellent drawer, painter, writer, etc.  It means that you're in touch with your product and identify where you may be able to think and act outside the box to ensure the success of your ad, campaign, product, and company.  It is the ideas that are classified as creative and it's only creative if it ends up generating profit.  Be thorough, thoughtful, direct, clear, and relentless and you may find yourself generating more creativity than you thought possible.

Until next time,