aren’t associated with purchase of products or services. Not to be politically incorrect or controversial, but these are your political and religious affiliations. In many cases, people don’t know why they believe what they believe or take the stand they do on social issues other than somewhere, someone taught them to believe a certain way or embrace certain values. Right or wrong is not the issue.
The issue is that people hold powerful beliefs that guide them, and they make life‐lasting choices and decisions based on these values and beliefs. People’s commitment to their chosen organization is so strong that they commit their time and even money to organizations that don’t give anything in return but intangibles, such as hope, faith, and anticipations of rewards if they stay the course and further the cause.
Experiences that keep people faithful to belief structures and value systems are present in all religious and political organizations despite how different they may be. For example, the same tenets are present in Christianity and all the various churches within this genre, Buddhism, Judaism, Islamism, and so on. These tenets exist in political organizations, too. These include symbolism, sensory appeal, promises, community, and rituals.
Successful brands integrate these same tenets. Think of your favorite brands. Note how they embrace these tenets. Apple is a great example of a brand using these cornerstones of religion to create a faithful following. Here’s how:
❯❯ Symbolism: The simple Apple icon recognizable by most consumers worldwide represents creativity, innovation, and personal power to communicate, self‐express, create, and enjoy music and other forms of entertainment.
❯❯ Sensory appeal: Apple’s products appeal to people’s senses by delivering music and videos with ease and giving them the chance to create their own creative and media events, which appeal to even more senses.
❯❯ Promises: People believe and experience the promise of quality and innovation and novelty as Apple releases new applications and capabilities.
❯❯ Community: Apple has many communities you can join online, such as iTunes, and has become a community itself through market penetration. Many people you know own Apple devices, and you can easily exchange ideas, tips, and enthusiasm.
❯❯ Ritual: Shopping at an Apple Store is a fun ritual. You have a cool setting to explore products; you’re assigned your own personal assistant when you walk in the door; your transactions are done causally via a hand scanner, not at a sterile divisive counter, so you feel more engaged with your assistant; and you can sign up for the Genius Bar and get one‐to‐one attention.
How can you create religious‐like events and thus loyalty for your brand? This book is full of ideas for doing just that. Check out Chapter 8 for digital tactics, Chapter 16 for emotional selling, and Chapter 2 on how to trigger the unconscious mind for unthinkable ROI.
Beyond getting religious about your branding and marketing programs, you need to push the boundaries of traditional marketing. Guerilla marketing is one way you can do this.
Guerilla marketing, also known as ambush marketing, is all about ideas that are outside the boundaries and take competitors and customers by surprise – competitors, because you did something that took attention or market share away from them, and customers, because you did something fun and engaging that exceeded routine expectations or experiences with competing brands.
A short definition is
Actions, messaging, creative, experience, and events that transcend the bounds of traditional marketing that focus on product, service, price, and other common messages
In addition to commanding attention, one of the primary goals of guerilla marketing is to change behavior for the better, or at least how you want consumer behavior to be to drive more sales and loyalty.
The Fun Theory
One of our favorite examples of changing behavior by changing up routines comes from Volkswagen who created The Fun Theory. This program was built around the notion that fun can change behavior for the better, kind of like the discussion in Chapter 8 about the power of gamification in building customer engagements.
For The Fun Theory initiative, Volkswagen asked people to create ideas for changing routine behavior for the better. It then tested and executed winning ideas to see whether they would indeed work.
Here are a few attention‐grabbing ideas that successfully changed routine behavior by doing something new and fun. As you review these ideas, ponder on how you can build on them to create “fun” customer experiences through every touch point of your customer journey – from need identification to purchase confirmation.
❯❯ Will fun reduce the amount of speeding in a city? This project involved setting up signs throughout Stockholm that showed people just how fast they were going. It was really nothing new because speed meters are located in many places these days; however, this program made it more fun to stay at or below the limit. The speed camera would track your speed and light up according to whether you were under or over the speed limit. If you were over, you were sent a ticket. If you were at or under the speed limit, you were entered into a lottery in which you could win a cash reward from the money collected by the speeders. It worked beautifully. In three days, the cameras tracked the speed of nearly 25,000 cars and found that the average speed for traffic went down from 32 kilometers per hour to 25 kilometers per hour, which is a 22 percent reduction in speed.
❯❯ Will fun get people to use stairs over escalators? Another “fun” experiment designed to get people to make healthier choices was to turn a staircase that sits adjacent to an escalator into a keyboard. If people could play music with their feet as they moved up or down the stairs, would they choose the stairs, the healthier option? The answer was yes as 66 percent more people than normal chose to take the stairs.
❯❯ Will fun get people to increase their use of recycle centers over trash cans? The Fun Theory’s bottle bank arcade experiment turned a bottle recycling depository into an arcade. Every time a bottle was placed inside, the depository would light up and make noises like a machine at an arcade. It would even add up points for each bottle people deposited. People flocked to see how many points they could rack up with bottle deposits, even though there was no way to cash in their points for a tangible reward. In just one night, nearly 100 people used the arcade depository as compared to 2 people who used the conventional depository that was routine and void of fun.
You can watch videos of these experiments in action at www.thefuntheory.com.
Other guerilla marketing examples
So, yes, fun and games motivate behavior, and if used for building brand images and product sales, they can be a highly effective form of guerilla marketing. With enough fun involved, you create a movement or a society frenzy like Pokémon, the game that uses augmented reality to present Pokémon characters on your mobile screen in a depiction of a real setting so that you and your avatar can capture the Pokémon and train them to help you battle against other players doing the same thing on their phones.
Some other activities along the lines of surprise or guerilla marketing include
❯❯ Augmented reality (AR): You can use augmented
