An investigaton into the relevance of Guerrilla Marketing to small and medium-sized enterprises

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2006 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 1.9, University of Lincoln (Faculty of Business & Law), course: Marketing & Advertising, language: English, abstract: Guerrilla (ge'ril?) marketing; an unconventional way of promotional marketing activities on a low-budget level. This aggressive marketing approach is characterised by creative and legal attacks targeted on competitors in order to maintain or increase awareness and impact to the customer. Guerrilla marketing stands for focusing on conventional goals such as profit or growth, but doing it by using exceptional promotional approaches, like advertising in yellow pages, wild postings or non-traditional outdoor advertising media vehicles. Customers are confronted with an increasing amount of advertising messages per day and therefore organisations have to develop advertising approaches to stand out in today's media fragmentation. Especially small and medium-sized enterprises are having greater internal limitations regarding a restricted budget for marketing communications and facing bigger external uncertainties than large organisation. Thus, marketing campaigns have to become profitable for an enterprise. The low-cost communication effort is one of the major issues for guerrilla marketers. It is particular relevant for a small company to apply a differentiated set of promotional methods to diversify itself from competition, but guerrilla marketing is also becoming more adopted by large enterprises. This dissertation aims to give the reader a complementary insight of guerrilla marketing and investigates its relevance for a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) in terms of generating profit. The purpose of this study is to identify how relevant this approach is to guerrilla entrepreneurs in small organisations, regarding profitability and flexibility in respect of strategy execution. The first section of this dissertation is concerned with the literal meaning and theory of guerrilla marketing, and its suitability for small and medium-scaled organisations. The second part focuses on the conduction of the survey which has been carried out in order to underline this research with qualitative and quantitative findings. Those findings are visualised and analysed in part three. The fourth part of this research study forms the implications of findings part, in which the results will be evaluated regarding the relevance of guerrilla marketing to small companies. The conclusion of this dissertation combined with a comparison between theory and practice highlight the last section of this research study.