Week 1 - MBA 6101 - Introduction and Guerilla Marketing

 Hello, my name is Matt Kern and I am an Assistant Operations Coordinator at a small company in Chicagoland. Though the position focuses on manufacturing operations and overseeing production, the company gives me a lot of freedom in how I accomplish the tasks assigned. I play a role in purchasing, production planning, data analysis and reporting, as well as sometimes diplomat when the need arises on the production floor. The pursuit of the MBA is to expand both my breadth and depth of knowledge in key areas of business which I utilize each day. When not working or at school, I enjoy golfing, bicycling, archery, fishing, and reading. On the topic of reading, I focus on non-fiction in the hope of gaining some of the leadership skills exhibited throughout history by such as Churchill, Washington, Patton, and the like.

On the subject of guerilla marketing. Typically, when one hears guerilla, they first think of a large hairy primate until they are corrected. The next thought is that of the Viet Cong, Mujahedeen, or Sandinistas. A small group, outnumbered, outgunned, and unable to confront their rival on even footing. What is one to do in such a situation? The answer was solved thousands of years ago by Sun Tzu of China and his book, The Art of War, "So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak" (Sun, 2017).

Now how do concepts meant for the battlefield relate to marketing? The idea is the same. A small company looking to grow must compete with large companies with vast resources at their disposal to push the small company out of the market. To compete, the small company uses guerilla marketing. Jay Conrad Levinson points out in the first chapter of his book Guerilla Marketing, that the small company has the advantage of flexibility and agility which the large companies do not have (Levinson, 2007). The focus is to out maneuver the larger rival and do so without breaking the bank. This turns the table on the large companies, allowing the small company to wiggle through the mass marketing to reach their desired customer with the same impact as that of the large companies' marketing.

Citations

Levinson, J. (2007). Guerilla Marketing: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from your Small Business. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

Sun, T. (2017). The Art of War. Filiquarian publishing