Week 4 - MBA 6101 - Guerilla Marketing

 

Hello,

Sun Tzu writes that “if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles” (Sun, 1983). One must know their capabilities, their strengths, and most importantly their own weaknesses. You must know this for when you compare your adversary’s capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses against your own. By doing so, you know the limits of what you can do and what your adversary can do. From there a plan can be formulated that maximizes your strengths, minimizes your weakness, and exploits your adversary’s weakness while avoiding their strengths. For a company, this method of assessment can be applied to understanding the customer and their needs.

 

 

The echoes of Sun Tzu can be heard on Jay Conrad Levinson’s advice to the budding marketing guerilla, “when you fully understand the true nature of your business, your goals, your strengths and weaknesses, your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, and the needs of your target market, your positioning will be that much easier to determine and your strategy that much easier to plan (Levinson, 2007). A marketing guerilla needs to match the value their product or service to the needs of the customer. To convey the value the product or service, there needs to be the right message to the right customer.

One size does not fit all. When a company tries to convey the message of their value, the company and guerilla need to be smart about how the message is crafted. Questions that must be raised are what does the target customer value? What does that customer need, and can the product meet that need? The guerilla must be skillful in tailoring their message for the tastes of the market yet must be willing to look elsewhere for additional avenues of approach. Neglected markets may be looking for a product or service like the one offered. The guerilla must always remain on the move, assessing the marketing, and looking for new customer bases.

 

Citations:

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

Sun, T. (1983). The Art of War. Dell Publishing