Ron Mertens’ blog

I just finished reading ‘Guerrilla marketing’, by Jay Conrad Levinson.

You hear a lot of talk about Guerrilla marketing in web 2.0 firms – they usually mean ‘free marketing’ as in no-ads, usually forum posting, comments, social marketing, digg, etc.  In fact this is not what Jay (which coined the term 20 years ago) meant.

Guerrilla marketing actually means very aggressive marketing for small businesses. He defines marketing as ‘any contact you have with anyone in the outside world’.  He says that if you want to be successful, than any such contact must be good. Most of the book is devoted to marketing techniques – from in store signs to radio and TV marketing (yeah, he claims they can be done on the cheap). It’s really fascinating stuff, unfortunately it’s not really relevant for me currently – in Metalgrass I don’t have a physical store, and buying ads is hardly justified for free sites with ad support such as OLED-Info.

He has some other interesting bits in the book. For example, he defines service as “whatever your customer defines service to be”. Smart. He talks about doing good: being the most flexible company, with good service, good smiling employees, helping the community – anything that actually builds confidence and loyalty. Every little bit counts. Even the company cars should look good and clean. I totally agree on that.  sometimes you see a van that is so run-down, you say “I don’t wanna buy from this company…”.

I think that if you do have a small business, be it a small restaurant or store or whatever – it’s really a good book to read and get lot’s of ideas from.

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