The Guerrilla Green Marketing Movement

Guerrilla marketing has been around for over 20 years. It is a movement (not as much as a technique) that helps businesses with limited resources compete with big corporate names for customers’ attention. Green marketing, on the other hand, is a marketing style that allows you to get more value for your money while having a reduced impact on the environment. Preferred by small businesses for its affordability and social responsibility, green marketing campaigns tend to make a lasting impact on the customers who experience it, and increase the brand’s value in people’s minds. See the similarities?

What is Guerrilla Marketing?

Guerrilla marketing is a marketing approach that reaches consumers in an engaging and unexpected way. According to Entrepreneur magazine, instead of asking you to invest money, guerrilla marketing suggests businesses to invest time, energy and imagination instead. It puts profits, not sales, as the main yardstick to success. You can get a better idea of what guerrilla marketing is all about by watching this great video on YouTube.

The term “Guerrilla Marketing” – which I’m not fond of, due to its negative implications – is based on the similarities of the strategies used both in this type of marketing and in warfare. According to Jonathan Margolis and Patrick Garrigan from the michael alan group, these are: a) identify your target (or audience); b) strategize where they are and how you can get the most effective impression; c) hit them in a way that is completely unexpected and impactful.

Guerrilla & Green Marketing Go Hand-In-Hand

There are three main characteristics guerrilla and green marketing share:
1) It’s all about seeing the product/service from a totally different perspective (turning it upside down)
2) They’re cheaper than traditional marketing
3) They’re both easy to track (when compared to other types of marketing)

Guerrilla marketing aims to make a lasting impact on the customer’s mind. It gives people something to talk about. Green marketing, on the other hand, focuses on using resources that are less harmful for the environment, and piggybacks on the power of word-of-mouth to spread the word on its campaign. In other words, both guerrilla and green marketing strategies focus on leveraging the social component of human nature, creating engaging and memorable campaigns.

Because of its focus on environmental sustainability, green marketing campaigns are also cheaper when compared to traditional marketing. Companies doing green or sustainable marketing only use the materials they will actually need, and save considerable sums of money through its word-of-mouth component. The same couldn’t be more accurate for guerrilla marketing. Some guerrilla marketing campaigns are ridiculously affordable because they only need a team of 5 people on the street for 3 hours dressed in chicken suits, or with branded t-shirts doing stand-up comedy in front of an art gallery. By thoroughly researching its audience (and its habits), and with a little imagination, guerrilla marketing campaigns are one of the best tools available to small businesses looking to promote its brand or upcoming event.

Both guerrilla strategies and green marketing campaigns aim to make the best out of limited marketing dollars. This is why tracking the campaign’s success is so important for this type of marketing movements. On the one hand, guerrilla marketing campaigns tend to be video-recorded by one of its team members, who quickly uploads it to a video-sharing network (this is why you’ll be able to find so many examples of guerrilla marketing campaigns on YouTube). This fact allows campaign organizers to effectively track their results, based on number of page views, comments and click-through rate to the company’s website. On the other hand, green marketing is about reducing its impact on the environment, thus using digital resources when possible (and offsetting its carbon emissions, naturally). By going digital, green marketers typically develop landing pages specific to each campaign, and heavily utilize social media networks such as twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. Because it’s all digital, it is easy to accurately track where each visitor came from, thus calculating the success of the campaign.

Guerrilla marketing strategies applied to green marketing campaigns will leverage your brand, create a buzz about your company within your audience and the media, and still provide that eco component that you and your customers value so much. Have you ever considered a guerrilla green marketing campaign for your business?