Guerrilla Marketing as the new Surrealism

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Advert­ising is the most ubi­quit­ous and vis­ible aspect of mar­ket­ing. Every day we are exposed to hun­dreds if not thou­sands of brand images.1. This onslaught of com­mu­nic­a­tion has been dubbed the Battle for Eye­balls. Con­sumers are under siege and have developed per­cep­tual vigil­ance to fil­ter out unwanted communication.

Just like in an ancient war­fare, mar­keters con­tinu­ously develop new siege engines to try to win the battle for eye­balls. One of the more cre­at­ive strategies is Guer­rilla Mar­ket­ing.2. Expres­sions of Guer­rilla Mar­ket­ing appear in unusual places and uses sur­real­ist mes­sages to attract atten­tion. Den­ver Water, for example, motiv­ated its cus­tom­ers to con­serve water by pla­cing absurd­ist expres­sions in pub­lic place.

Surrealist marketing by Denver Water.

“Use Only What You Need” cam­paign by Den­ver Water.

Guer­rilla mar­ket­ing is remin­is­cent of sur­real­ist art. Sur­real­ist works by artists such as Sal­vador Dalí and René Mag­ritte, fea­ture an ele­ment of sur­prise, jux­ta­pos­i­tions and illo­gical images. Sur­real­ist art flour­ished in the 1930s and was expressed in paint­ing, film, writ­ing, theatre and music. The sur­real­ists sought to free soci­ety from false ration­al­ity and restrict­ive cus­toms by using absurd­ist humour and jux­ta­pos­i­tions of real­ity. Sur­real­ism was first and fore­most a philo­soph­ical idea, expressed in art.

René Magritte, Philosopher’s Lamp (La Lampe philosophique), 1936.

René Mag­ritte, Philosopher’s Lamp (La Lampe philo­sophique), 1936.

Sur­real­ism and guer­rilla mar­ket­ing share com­mon ground. Both are expres­sions of post-modernism in that they acknow­ledge that real­ity is mail­able and only exists in its inter­pret­a­tion. Sur­real­ism and guer­rilla mar­ket­ing use humour to pierce the observer’s rational defences. While sur­real­ist art depicts an altern­at­ive real­ity and is con­fined to museums and gal­ler­ies, guer­rilla mar­ket­ing changes real­ity itself and is placed in the social reality.

Although both have a con­vey a mes­sage bey­ond the work of art itself, the major dif­fer­ence between sur­real­ism and guer­rilla mar­ket­ing is the motiv­a­tion. Sur­real­ism is a philo­soph­ical move­ment groun­ded in anarch­ism and Marx­ism. Guer­rilla mar­ket­ing is gen­er­ally aimed cap­it­al­ist inspired profit max­im­isa­tion. How­ever, the Den­ver Water example shows that advert­ising is neces­sar­ily aimed and max­im­ising the prof­it­ab­il­ity of a product but can be used to achieve the reverse.

Guer­rilla mar­ket­ing could be renamed sur­real­ist mar­ket­ing as it shares many char­ac­ter­ist­ics with this school of thought. How­ever, using sur­real­ism to pro­mote con­sumer­ism is a con­tra­dic­tion in terms as the ulti­mate aim of sur­real­ism is to open the observer’s mind to a new real­ity and not rein­force the old ways of thinking.

Notes
  1. James B. Twitchell (1996) Adcult USA: The tri­umph of advert­ising in Amer­ican cul­ture. New York: Columbia Uni­ver­sity Press. [↩]
  2. Jay Con­rad Lev­in­son (1984) Guer­rilla Mar­ket­ing. [↩]

First Law of Consumer Behaviour

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The beha­viour of con­sumers is an intensely stud­ied sub­ject in a world that is dom­in­ated by con­sump­tion of goods and ser­vices. Psy­cho­lo­gists, anthro­po­lo­gists, neur­o­lo­gists, eco­nom­ists and many other highly trained sci­ent­ists bundle together to influ­ence the beha­viour of con­sumers. Prac­tic­ally, how can a product be designed, posi­tioned and advert­ised so that we can sell more jeans than the competition?

Our pos­ses­sions are a major con­tri­bu­tion to our iden­tity and as such we can not under­stand con­sumer beha­viour without under­stand­ing what mean­ing con­sumers attach to pos­ses­sions.1. Using a the­at­rical meta­phor, our pos­ses­sions are the props we need to play the roles we have in soci­ety.2.

Our self is, how­ever, not a sin­gu­lar pro­pos­i­tion. We carry a range of pos­sible selves  that rep­res­ent our ideas of what we would like to become. These provide ideals of the self  func­tion as incent­ives for future beha­viour. Pos­sible selves are the ideal selves that we would very much like to become. The ten­sion between our real and ideal self is a major motiv­a­tional force.3.

In our quest to achieve the ideal self we need to have, among other things, the right pos­ses­sions. This is the core of what most mar­ket­ing is about. Cre­ate products that help people to sig­nal their ideal self to oth­ers. This leads to the first law of con­sumer beha­viour, beau­ti­fully illus­trated by this advert­ise­ment by Swish Jeans:

Real Self + Brand = Ideal Self

Swish Jeans ad illustrating the first law of consumer behaviour: real self plus brand equals ideal self.

Notes
  1. Belk, R. W. (1988). Pos­ses­sions and the exten­ded self. Journal of Con­sumer Research, 15(2), 139–168. [↩]
  2. Goff­man, E. (1959). The Present­a­tion of Self in Every­day Life. [↩]
  3. Hazel Markus, & Paula Nurius. (1986). Pos­sible selves. Amer­ican Psy­cho­lo­gist, 41(9), 954–969. [↩]

The Entrepreneur and the Academic

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Selling chipsWalk­ing around Mel­bourne city one after­noon I decided to have some chips for lunch and ended up in a trendy chip­pery in Eliza­beth Street, munch­ing away on some deep fried pota­toes and mayo. The man serving me was the owner, an entre­pren­eur exper­i­enced in the fast food busi­ness. He, lets call him Brad, spoke openly  and explained how he tries to make a buck in the hyper-competitive world of fast food.

Brad cel­eb­rated big suc­cesses in this mar­ket in the past but emphas­ised that he had only com­pleted high school and has no formal busi­ness qual­i­fic­a­tions whatsoever.

Some time ago, Brad atten­ded a post gradu­ate man­age­ment lec­ture at a local uni­ver­sity. First Brad thought that the lec­turer was talk­ing gobbledy­gook, but after a while recog­nised that the the­or­ies presen­ted in this lec­ture actu­ally match what he does intu­it­ively to run his business.

I told Brad that I occa­sion­ally teach mar­ket­ing at La Trobe uni­ver­sity. What man­age­ment sci­ent­ist do, I con­tin­ued, is to study entre­pren­eurs like Brad to fig­ure out how they do busi­ness and present this back to stu­dents in the­or­ies, for­mu­las and dia­grams. One of the aims of busi­ness stud­ies is to unlock the intu­it­ive know­ledge of entre­pren­eurs such as Brad so that other, less gif­ted and more risk averse bud­ding entre­pren­eurs, can rep­lic­ate their success.

The entre­pren­eur is the hero of con­tem­por­ary cap­it­al­ism and has been ideal­ised and stud­ied in great detail by schol­ars around the world, each look­ing for the holy grail of entre­pren­eur­ship. Research­ers study entre­pren­eurs like ety­mo­lo­gists study insects. They dis­sect them,  ana­lyse them, observe their beha­viour in order to extract the essence of what it is that makes them successful.

Entre­pren­eur­ial bio­graph­ies are, how­ever, always incom­plete and san­it­ised ver­sions of real­ity. The essence of entre­pren­eur­ship is a myth­ical concept in busi­ness stud­ies that can only be known through exper­i­en­cing what it is to be in busi­ness, not by study­ing it

Fur­ther reading:

Clear Your Head

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Arjan Zuid­hof is a guest author and effi­ciency coach based in the Netherlands.

Pre­par­a­tion:

  1. Have pen­cil and paper ready.
  2. Make sure you’re in a quiet place without danger to be dis­turbed before read­ing on.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tza/3214197147

This is a simple yet power­ful way to get all those plans and ideas that are buzz­ing around in your brain all day long under con­trol. These thoughts are con­stantly dis­tract­ing you, pre­vent­ing you from mak­ing short– and long-term plans.

Truth is: they can’t help it, it’s you that haven’t decided any­thing about them that will make them keep nag­ging you. What you need is a reli­able external sys­tem to get them out of your head.

One of these com­pletely reli­able sys­tems is David Allen’s Get­ting Things Done (GTD) sys­tem. But it takes at least a month to read the book and start mak­ing this method our own. We don’t have that long right now.

There a huge issue with all those loose ends circ­ling around both in your head and head­ing your dir­ec­tion from the out­side world. You will be reminded about the stu­pid­est things at the least expec­ted moment. Even worse: don’t do any­thing about them, and they will finally just dis­ap­pear. Too bad, because while most ideas have no future value, some of them are real gems. One of them might even change the world. So make sure you do some­thing with those gems! How? Read on …

Start Writ­ing

Grab that pen and paper that have so patiently been wait­ing next to you. Dur­ing the next ten minutes you will start to write down lit­er­ally everything that’s in your head. This will range from small actions that need imme­di­ate atten­tion up to big future pro­jects whose impact you can­not yet even fathom. It doesn’t mat­ter what it is, once it’s writ­ten down it will be out of your head. Things you might encounter:

  1. Clean­ing up the backyard
  2. Find a good school for my kid
  3. Improve my jobskills
  4. Learn how to use Prezi instead of Power­point for presentations
  5. Write an ebook about … (fill in your specialty)
  6. Update your daily administration
  7. Empty your e-mail inbox
  8. Pre­pare present­a­tion for quarterly meet­ing next week
  9. Get XYZ pro­ject back on track with Isaac and Charlie
  10. And so on, and so on.

Don’t spend any time think­ing about those weird things you’re jot­ting down. What you’re going to do with them later is irrel­ev­ant now. By the way, did you notice that most things on the list above — apart from items 6 and 7 — are big­ger things than just 1 action? In GTD-speak they’re called pro­jects, “all desired out­comes that take more than one action to com­plete” or goals. Goals are good, but can not be acted on imme­di­ately. They need to be made more spe­cific, and nor­mally fol­low the route from defin­ing pro­jects first and actions later.

Now start writ­ing. Take your time and keep writ­ing, until your head is com­pletely empty. If ten minutes of frantic writ­ing are not enough, hold on. Later you’ll thank your­self! OK, there we go, I’m wait­ing for you …

Ready? When everything went accord­ing to plan, you now have an impress­ive list in front of you. Full of action­able items, pro­jects and the more fuzzy goals. With less than 30 points you either have an extremely laid­back life or cheated. In the lat­ter case: maybe write a little more? Until the num­ber approaches 50 or even 100 you’re prob­ably not done yet. This only works if your head is really clear of every loose end — you will know when you’re done.

What you have achieved now is that everything is in a trus­ted sys­tem out­side your head. Now it comes down to the most import­ant thing: really doing some­thing with this inform­a­tion. First look at things that can be done in one step: your actions. These go on an action list, to be done the moment you are ready for them. The rest of your items are either pro­jects or goals. Put them on two sep­ar­ate lists, and keep them current..In the future, these lists make it easier for you to focus on what’s requir­ing your atten­tion now (pro­jects) and to check whether your actions are in line with where you’re head­ing in life and work.

Bonus Tip

Over­whelmed by a huge pro­ject list? Do not shoot the mes­sen­ger  ;-) this is all your stuff. Who says you are required to com­plete the entire list? Take a crit­ical look at the pro­jects that don’t give energy and that you can elim­in­ate without risk of get­ting in trouble. Be hon­est, there’s more to be deleted than you think. You are your own judge.

A waste of time, all this list­mak­ing? On the con­trary! You have found a way to get those loose ends out of your head. This will give a tre­mend­ous amount of energy and focus. From now on you’re doing only things that are import­ant to YOU. It’s hard to come up with a bet­ter timesaver than that, I’d say.

Good luck clear­ing your head. Did it work? Share your exper­i­ences below.

Snakes and Corporate Ladders

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The career path of a man­ager on her way to the board room is full of unex­pec­ted sur­prises. It might some times even feel like you are play­ing a game of Snakes & Lad­ders, the pop­u­lar children’s board game.

At Hypo­thet­icorp we have cre­ated the ulti­mate career sim­u­lator for a bit of fun and games. Who will get to the board room first? Down­load the pdf file and play our Snakes & Cor­por­ate Lad­ders game and find out whether you will make it all the way to the board room.

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