Guerrilla Marketing Excellence

This paper is a discussion of Jay Conrad Levinson's Guerrilla Marketing Excellence: The Fifty Golden Rules for Small-Business Success. Levinson continues to apply his concept of the "guerrilla mind" to questions of marketing; although this volume purports to be designed for small businesses, many of his rules are just as applicable to (and maybe more appropriate for) larger concerns. He begins by focusing on changing conventional thinking about marketing, then progresses through a series of steps aimed at doing business in a different kind of way than is often considered from a traditional sales-oriented marketing point of view. His guidelines, while breezily written and delivered in fifty bite-sized pieces, add up to an approach that focuses on long-term, customer-oriented ways of doing business, most of which make sense in an increasingly sophisticated, competitive marketplace.

Levinson argues that a thorough knowledge of marketing is essential to business success, including "the small but omnipotent details untouched by most marketing courses, unpracticed by many marketing departments" (x). He argues for approaching the subject of marketing with the attitude that certain rules exist, not to be broken but to be followed exactly, since most of them apply across the board to all kinds of businesses and exist for solid, proven reasons.

He divides his 50 rules into four general and fairly arbitrary categories. He begins with rules to change the marketer's conventiona

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to get his message across, since he also believes in the power and effectiveness of repetition (he begins the last two paragraphs of his Preface, for example, with exactly the same sentence: "Guerrilla marketing's 50 golden rules are yours to follow or to ignore" (xi), a statement he argues strongly against). The third section of the book focuses on marketing materials, and some of his comments about TV advertising, among other things, actually belong here. This is the most substantial part of the book, though it may consequently be the least useful to the general marketing student. Because he is trying to discuss marketing for all types of businesses, he risks not being able to cover all the bases. Several of these rules concentrate on print advertising, without really examining the available outlets or much of the research about the relative effectiveness of such an approach. He lists "good" and "bad" words for ad headlines, for instance, without using any concrete examples of why such words are likely to be effective or likely to work against the advertiser. Although the book is peppered with anecdotes, Levinson tends not to use as many specific examples as he might to prove his points. The final section focuses on ac

Category: Business - G