Week #5 – MBA 6101 – Guerrilla Marketing, Chapter 5: Developing Truly Creative Marketing

In Developing Truly Creative Marketing, Chapter 5 of Guerilla Marketing; Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits FromYour Small Business, Levinson provides a simple tenet to guide an effective marketing strategy: “marketing is not creative unless it sells the offering.”

According to Levinson, a successful guerrilla marketing strategy begins with a basic “creative message.” The creative message has three basic elements— the purpose of the message, the benefits that will be emphasized to achieve the message’s purpose, and the brand’s personality.

To guarantee that the marketing plan will be successful, Levinson supplies a seven-step outline:

1. Find the inherent drama within your offering.

The inherent drama of the organization’s offering are the appealing or compelling reasons why potential customers would consider your product or service.

2. Translate that inherent drama into a meaningful benefit.

This step of the marketing plan focuses on the benefit of your product or service, not the features of the product or service. While the offering may have several benefits, it’s important to narrow the focus to three or less. 

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

For Levinson, it’s critically important to overcome the it’s just marketing audience mindset and convince potential customers that your offering is genuine, not hyperbolic or inflated. 

4. Get people’s attention

According to Levinson, “people do not pay attention to advertising; they pay attention only to things that interest them.”  Levinson states that it’s crucial for a marketer to draw the attention of a potential customer and hold their interest.   

5. Motivate your audience to get involved

This step of the marketing plan is the call to action. It should stimulate your potential customer to take the next step, whether it’s visiting a website or visiting a store.

6. Be sure you are communicating clearly

According to Levinson, the goal of the message should be “zero ambiguity.” The meaning of your message must be translatable for your offering’s entire audience.

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

This stage requires the guerrilla marketer to take a wide view of the marketing strategy. If the “blueprint” falls short of meeting the strategy, according to Levinson, it’s time to “scrap it and start again.”

Levinson states that, “creativity comes from knowledge.”  Guerrilla marketing demands that you be more ingenious than your rivals to support a competitive edge.
It’s paramount that your marketing strategy is more creative, intelligent, clear, consistent, and perhaps most importantly, better planned than your competition.   To improve creativity, its especially important to have total comprehension of the organization and their product or service.  It’s also important to be astute, to develop a perception of the world beyond your organization including the “economy, current events, and the trends of the time.”  Along with enhancing the creative input into your marketing, this positions the guerrilla marketer to be more flexible and adaptable in their approach, and well-tuned to the real world.